Sustainable Fashion for Children's Clothing: Exploring Permanent Pleating for Adaptive Fit and Textile Waste Reduction

Textile waste has become a serious global problem, leading to pollution, resource depletion, and overcrowding in landfills. To overcome these problems, sustainable design strategies that reduce resource consumption, minimize waste, and maintain ecological balance are needed. Additionally, children's rapid growth demands regular clothes changes, which generates a lot of fabric wastage. This highlights a serious research gap in creative, adaptable, waste-reducing ideas for children's clothing, which affects the sustainability of the textile industry. This study explores the potential of permanent pleating in children’s clothing to develop sustainable, innovative designs that minimize waste and improve garment durability. In particular, permanent pleating in both the lengthwise and widthwise directions are investigated, and the durability and fit of pleated garments are assessed, as well as manufacturing limitations and challenges. Permanent pleating was applied to 100% polyester, a polyester-cotton blend, and 100% cotton fabrics using pleating moulds and three distinct methods: oven drying, oven drying with water mugs, and steaming. The results revealed that the steaming method yielded the most successful permanent pleats on 100% polyester fabric, outperforming the polyester-cotton blend and 100% cotton fabrics. Permanent pleating reduces frequent clothing replacement by allowing the fabric to expand and fit various body sizes without losing structural integrity. This aids in sustainable children's clothing development by providing a new method to cut textile waste, benefiting both the fashion industry and customers.