Teachers’ technical experience crucial for the new UN collection

While the design process for the new collection was creative and inclusive, taking design ideas from sketches to finished, production-ready garments required extensive expertise. Here, the technical teaching staff at the Swedish School of Textiles proved to be an invaluable resource for leading and coordinating the technical product development of all the UN collection’s products.

“We went from idea to finished product delivered to the guides in New York in just over a year. Normally, for a fashion company, it takes considerably longer. At the same time, it is important to remember that we as a university lack established processes for putting products on the market, so the entire process needed to be developed in parallel. It was a challenging but instructive project that we were able to manage by working together,” said Susanne Nejderås, who was overall Project Leader for the project and otherwise works as Textile Strategist at the University of Borås.

Ann-Charlotte Höijer, Senior Lecturer in Textile Technology with a background in product development and quality, and Niina Hernandez, Senior Lecturer in Textile Technology and an expert in fit and construction, took on the task of testing, quality assurance, production adaptation, and communication with manufacturers.

“Taking a design idea and making it production-ready requires a special expertise that is often invisible in the end result. In the UN project, this expertise was crucial, especially as the design team consisted of students in different years of the programmes who were still learning and did not have experience in production to any great extent,” said Niina Hernandez.

“Our work involved analysing each garment technically: which materials and accessories worked in different perspectives, such as design, quality, legal requirements, care, and comfort. We also reviewed how the garments should be cared for and what labelling was required to comply with the legal requirements,” Ann-Charlotte Höijer continued.

Creating garments that fit the different body types of the guides while retaining the design expression was a central challenge. Some examples where the design expression was especially important to keep were the stripped-down design and the asymmetry.

“It may look easy to twist the collar, for example, but technically, it’s very difficult to do while maintaining comfort. This required both technical knowledge, design experience, and close collaboration with the manufacturer. As a teacher, it was a particular joy to work with a former student at the manufacturer, which increased the speed of communication as we all share common ground,” Niina concludes.

Hear Niina and Ann-Charlotte speak about the work of moving from design to production: