Seamless style

Yijue (unique clothes in Chinese) is the registered brand of Liu Shuangwu's seamless lace embroidered gowns, but what makes his creations unique?

"The first is that our cloth has no seams or hems," explains Liu, the inventor and patent owner of this technology.

Most people conceive of clothing stitched together with seams being essential, but Liu's gowns use the lace design for the connecting threads to go through to put the dresses together.

The fabric pieces are in various shapes and sizes, from circles to hexagons, 5-cm diameter to 15-cm diameter, and individually tailored for customers if the customer's measurements are available.

"Actually, embroidering the cloth is very easy and we can provide numerous patterns catering to our customers but joining the fabric together using our machine is very difficult and is the key to our technology," says the 60-year-old Beijinger, who has been devoted to the technology development and improvement of his Yijue line for more than a decade.

At Liu's plant, all the embroidery and sewing work are done with computer embroidery machines, and how to program the computer and adjust the machines is the company's most closely held secret.

Liu's wife is the programmer and Liu is skillful at machine design, though neither have any formal education or vocational training in the processes.

"We learned from experiences, we both worked in textile factories for around 20 years," the born- technician says.

Internationally known Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake began developing seamless clothing in 1995. The technology combines weaving, tailoring, sewing, and cutting into one step and processes tube-form clothes for customers.

Miyake registered patents and brands such as A-POC, (short for "a piece of clothing"), a custom collection for men and women, but the clothes are not individually tailored.

According to Liu, Yijue is also unique due to a combination of tradition and modernization. The embroidery and style of clothes are traditional Chinese, while the computer is contemporary.

This season, embroidery elements can be seen in collections of many fashion giants such as Prada, Dior and Chanel. An embroidered Prada blouse is priced at 59,800 yuan in Shin Kong Place, one of the most luxurious department stores in Beijing.

So far, the majority of Liu's products are traditional Chinese-style gowns. "For the time being, we will stick to catering to our key consuming group - foreigners," says Liu.

Compared with those international fashion brands, Yijue is still something of "a baby". "But I believe, we can be something in the international market, it's just a matter of time," Liu stresses with confidence.

Yijue's clothes are priced according to the number of embroidery needles, the fabric, (cotton, silk and wool) and decorative materials, such as pearls and crystal.

Generally, making a knee-length seamless embroidered lace gown requires least 30,000-needles worth of embroidery, equivalent to the needles of 300 ordinary men shirts, and it takes three to four days for a worker to operate the machine. If not decorated, the price is around 2,000 yuan

Liu has two special booths in high-end Beijing department stores and majority of his gowns are exported directly to the United States, Japan and Europe.

(China Daily 12/01/2008 page12)