Teijin Frontier Co., Ltd. has developed a new fabric boasting a premium black color that is expected to meet demands for lightweight, easy-care formal wear.
Up to now, it had been difficult to reduce a fabric’s weight while retaining its deep black color for use in 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 color, making it unsuitable for formal black wear by its weight.
Teijin Frontier’s solution optimizes the fiber, fabric structure and post-dyeing processing technology in lightweight, premium black fabrics. To realize a premium black color, the company developed a new polyester combined-filament yarn by incorporating new polymer and yarn-processing technologies with orientation control. Light reflection is suppressed by lowering the refractive index and using thin-film fabrication processing to make the yarn bulky, so low transparency is achieved without shrinkage of the fabric.
In the development stage, Teijin Frontier produced a deep black color by greatly shrinking the yarn, but this raised the fiber’s density and increased its contact area, which led to whitening due to friction. Later, the yarn structure was redesigned and the yarn fineness optimized, which achieved reduced shrinkage and greater bulkiness, thus decreasing whitening.
Teijin Frontier is exploring marketing opportunities and sample sales for formal black wear. Annual sales are expected to reach 200 million yen (US$1.76 million) by the fiscal year ending in March 2020.