Sustainable Fashion Through Traditional Turkish Women’s Clothing Techniques

Abstract

The production of garments from fabric involves multiple stages, each contributing to the final product’s design and the resulting fabric waste. The fashion industry produces 97 million tons of waste annually, of which 18 million are leftover textiles. Fast fashion increases the amount of textile waste created by industry and consumers. The zero-waste approach has begun to be implemented in clothing design to minimize the amount of fabric waste generated in the pre-consumer production stage. The collection design and patternmaking stages, well before the cutting process, present a pivotal opportunity to apply zero-waste fashion design techniques. At the design stage of zero-waste clothes, the fashion designer and pattern maker precisely plan to ensure that fabric pieces fit together like a puzzle using the entire fabric width. In response to the growing concern over fabric waste, this paper explores how traditional garment construction techniques can be applied to contemporary garment design to reduce waste. Traditional construction methods were used for three dress patterns to explore how they might affect fabric utilization and garment production. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.