Epson hosted its second annual Epson Digital Couture event in February in advance of Fashion Week in New York City. Showcasing 11 designers’ collections from North and Latin America created using Epson’s textile printing solutions, the runway experience was built around the theme “Harmony and Peace through Fashion.” The Epson Digital Couture event showcased the design freedom, efficiencies and capabilities of Epson’s digital printing technologies for the fashion and textile industry.
“Since Epson is not a textile brand, we started having runway shows at our printing trade shows. Nobody expected that, and we started to create some noise,” recalled Catalina Frank, product manager for professional imaging at Epson, including the SureColor dye-sublimation product line. “The next step was being part of Fashion Week Brazil, in São Paulo, where we were able to work with the well-known Brazilian designer Lino Villaventura.” Soon Epson was featuring their own runways at textile trade shows, a first for the company, in countries like Ecuador, Colombia and Peru.
Following its 2015 acquisition of For.Tex, a leader in the sales and marketing of textile inks, and leveraging its ongoing partnership with Robustelli, a company specializing in the development, manufacturing and sales of digital textile printers, Epson also showcased an assortment of high-quality textile samples during the event. These relationships uniquely position Epson to further accelerate the growth of the global textile printing business.
“Digital technology has changed every industry it’s touched, and now it’s revolutionizing the fashion industry,” said Keith Kratzberg, executive vice president, Epson America. “The Epson Digital Couture event showcases the amazing creative potential and stunning color reproduction that designers are able to achieve using Epson’s textile printing technology. Today this is a $7.5 billion market projected to grow more than 34 percent worldwide (InfoTrends 2014-2019 Digital Textile Forecast), and a tremendous opportunity for Epson and its partners.”
According to Epson, dye-sublimation and direct-to-garment technologies enable limitless design possibilities across the textile and fashion industry allowing entrepreneurs and established fashion brands to print on a variety of fabrics in real-time, including cotton and synthetic fibers, for a new level of creative freedom. The end result is original prints of the highest quality unique to each designer on fabrics that can define and convey their signature style.
“For the second year in a row, the Epson Digital Couture event showcased how today’s fashion designers are leveraging innovative printing technologies to bring their creative visions to life,” said Agustin Chacon, Epson America’s vice president of international marketing. “Epson’s digital textile printing technologies provide fashion designers with the flexibility to produce ultra-creative designs.”
“It was great to see that so many people were truly interested in the designers’ work, asking about what inspired them and how they liked working with the Epson printer for the project,” Catalina explained. “And to hear the designers talk about how they saw their vision come to life because they used the technology and being able to differentiate themselves from the competition because they can create their own fabrics—that told me we were successful.”
