Engineered For Life

As Uniqlo furthers its commitment to perfecting even the most minute details; we head over to New York to preview the Autumn/Winter 2017 LifeWear collection and see up close the inner workings of its R&D centre.

- Jeffrey Yan

Uniqlo has gargantuan ambitions – to create clothes that would serve every walk of life, for every purpose and occasion – but then, it is a gigantic company. Asia’s largest apparel retailer (and the world’s third largest) posted total revenues exceeding USD13 billion in 2016. The company believes that luxury lies not in skyhigh price tags, but in tireless 360-degree innovation to better the clothes we all need, and to bring those clothes to as many people as it can reach.

This quiet quest to constantly improve the everyday and create new classics lie at the heart of the brand’s A/W ’17 LifeWear collection, which we got to see in close-up detail at its New York presentation and its research and development centre recently.

The biggest news in terms of innovations this season is in the company’s knit and denim categories. In the former, Uniqlo has teamed up with the renowned Shima Seiki Manufacturing on an Innovation Factory specialising in knitwear. The first results of that partnership were unveiled at the A/W ’17 presentation – 3D U-Knits that were completely seamless, forming graceful curves and effortlessly streamlined silhouettes that can only be achieved with the 3D knitting process. The company hopes to further develop this technology to the point where it can one day create knits custom to the bodies of each individual customer.