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The Cold War may be over, but the fabric wars are heating up – and America’s
textiles companies are turning to the nation’s weapons scientists to help
them manufacture their wares faster and more cheaply, and stem the flood
of cheap, counterfeit clothing that robs US designer labels of their profits.

In a scheme called the AMTEX Partnership, begun in March, manufacturers
and experts in missile technology from the Department of Energy’s laboratories
are working together to try to make the fabric industry more competitive.
‘The DOE labs see that their mission is changing from one that’s been in
many ways dominated by the weapons programme,’ says Douglas Lemon, who manages
the textile programme for the laboratories. ‘They want to expand their mission
into the area of industrial competitiveness.’ Manufacturers and government
scientists agree that there is much that can be done. For instance, when
the industry complained about the masses of counterfeit clothing passed
off as designer brands overseas, scientists saw that military technology
might have an answer – in the form of small computer-chip identity tags.
These were originally designed to back up the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,
but were never actually used. They were intended to be embedded in nuclear
warheads, so that nations could keep track of each other’s stockpiles.

But if the chips were small, cheap, and robust enough, they could be
sewn into clothes, complete with a message, saying, perhaps: ‘Authentic
Levi Strauss jeans’. Retailers could be sure they were getting the genuine
item – and US companies could save as much as $6 billion a year.

Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest laboratories
plan to unveil the first results of their tagging experiments in a year.

Five other projects have been launched under the AMTEX Partnership.
One is designed to harness the sensing systems that help ‘smart’ missiles
recognise targets by ‘training’ them to aim at objects that look like army
tanks rather than lorries, for instance. But in this case, sensors would
pinpoint flaws in fabrics, extra, missing or tangled threads, tears, or
faults in dyeing or printing.

Other scientists are developing ways to cut cloth quickly, with the
help of laser systems developed from Star Wars research. They also want
to improve recovery of costly and often hazardous dyes from water, and cut
down on the energy used to work the dye into the cloth.

Most important to the industry is the plan to computerise the ‘demand
chain’, so that rising sales of a particular magenta shirt will quickly
alert retailers, garment manufacturers, and finally weavers, dyers and growers,
that magenta shirts are in demand. Today, it takes messages 66 weeks to
pass down the demand chain – by which time magenta shirts could be hopelessly
out of fashion.