Teijin Frontier, the Teijin group's fibre-product converting company, has developed a new fabric that has a premium black colour and is expected to meet the growing demand for lightweight, easy-care formal wear. “Until now, it was difficult to reduce a fabric’s weight while retaining its deep black colour for use as formal wear. The reason was that the fabric had to be shrunk to prevent light reflection and increase its density to achieve a deep black colour, making it unsuitable for formal black wear by its weight,” says Tejin.
To ensure a premium black colour, the company developed a new polyester combined-filament yarn by using a new polymer technology combined with a new yarn-processing technology with orientation control. The brand’s solution was designed to optimise the fibre, the fabric structure and the post-dyeing processing technology in lightweight, premium black fabric. Light reflection was suppressed by lowering the refractive index and using thin-film fabrication processing to make the yarn bulky, thus low transparency is achieved without shrinkage of the fabric.
Still in the development stage, Teijin Frontier produced a deep black colour by greatly shrinking the yarn, but this raised the fibre’s density and increased its contact area which led to whitening due to friction. The thread structure was redesigned to ensure less shrinkage and finer yarn threads. Reduced shrinkage and greater bulkiness decreased whitening surface. The company is now exploring marketing opportunities and sample sales for formal black wear. Annual sales are forecast to touch $1.76 million by the fiscal ending March 2020.
Teijin is a technology-driven group offering advanced solutions in the areas of environmental value; safety, security and disaster mitigation; and demographic change and increased health consciousness. Its main fields of operation are high-performance fibres such as aramid, carbon fibres and composites, healthcare, films, resin and plastic processing, polyester fibres, products converting and IT. The group has some 170 companies and around 19,000 employees across 20 countries worldwide.
