How an industrial apparel brand stitches narrative into fabric, thread and label

How do you make a T-shirt that tells a story not through a printed slogan but through the weave of its fabric, the chemistry of its inks, or the absence of a care label at the neck? A new study from Eskişehir Technical University and the Turkish apparel brand KAFT tackles exactly that question, analysing four narrative-design projects carried out inside the brand’s registered Design Centre between January 2024 and June 2025. Published in the journal Fashion and Textiles, the research builds a three-mode typology for classifying where, in the material body of an industrial garment, narrative meaning is physically embedded, and it is unusually candid about what its evidence can and cannot support.

The study, led by Özgür Ceylan with colleagues including Irmak Taş, Nesligül Kılıç and Emel Aydın from the university and Ali Emre Arpacı, Elif Gökçe Yeşilbaş and Nail Çırak from KAFT, applies qualitative multiple-case methodology grounded in Practice-Based Design Research and read through a sociosemiotic lens. The researchers drew on internal project closeout reports, design briefs, production records, photographic documentation, textile swatches and the brand’s product-page narratives.

The resulting typology distinguishes three modes of narrative integration. In material narrative integration, the fabric itself carries the meaning. In technical narrative integration, the meaning resides in the decoration techniques applied to the substrate. In structural narrative integration, the garment’s construction and trim do the narrative work. A fourth strategy, called phygital, is advanced only as a proposed extension because it rests on a single case and involves a narrative relation external to the garment, linking it to a digital media network rather than to its own material body.

The first case, the Sketchbook collection, exemplifies the material mode. KAFT’s Design Centre custom-developed a lightweight 100 percent cotton woven fabric engineered to mimic the surface texture of canvas paper. High-mesh serigraphy with water-based inks then rendered three sketch graphics onto this substrate. The researchers describe the operative semiotic device as a denotative-connotative coupling at the fabric surface: denotatively, the textile is simply a woven fabric; connotatively, within the collection’s framing, it functions as the cultural sign of the canvas used in artistic practice. The print sits on the canvas-textured fabric rather than against it, producing what the authors call a haptic feedback loop in which touch confirms what the eye reads. Three designs were produced at 1,500 units each, a total of 4,500 units, a figure the study reproduces as a marker of industrial scale rather than as evidence of any consumer response.

The Heavyweight Series illustrates the technical mode. Here the substrate is a 100 percent cotton heavyweight single jersey knit, described qualitatively as engineered to support dense ink deposits and embroidery without dimensional deformation. Four designs, named ROUNGLE, TİC Kİ DİRO, RUUW and NAKA, were produced at 1,500 units each, totalling 6,000 units. The decoration combines two integrated techniques: serigraphy with a lower mesh than the Sketchbook collection, yielding higher ink saturation and tactile relief, using both water-based and discharge inks, the latter achieving fibre-integrated pigmentation by deactivating the substrate’s reactive dye; and embroidery applied in conjunction with the printed surface. The connotative reading is that decorative density and technique combination signal artisanal care, legible to the wearer through touch where embroidery overlies print as much as through sight.

The Diagonal Tank, a women’s crop tank sold under the IGAMI name in five colourways, occupies the structural mode. Three interventions operate in tandem. The garment is cut from diagonal panels, so the seams trace a geometric figure that is part of the design rather than a consequence of pattern efficiency. The external brand-label position carries a jacquard-woven illustration, a complete woven element whose pattern carries the narrative content. And the conventional sewn-in care label at the inner neck is replaced by an internal serigraphy print of the size information and the design’s pattern image applied directly to the fabric. Elements that conventionally serve as production infrastructure are repurposed as message-bearing surfaces, while conventional message carriers are absorbed into the garment’s structure.

This case also furnishes the study’s sharpest negative finding. Replacing the sewn-in care label can be read as a step toward mono-materiality, a design strategy in which a garment is constructed from a single fibre type throughout, including sewing thread, labels and trims, to facilitate end-of-life material recovery. But the closeout records no substitution of the sewing thread, whose polyester composition the study rests on industry norm rather than a documented fibre test. The garment as supplied is therefore not mono-material at the fibre level, and the fibre content of the jacquard-woven illustration is not documented. The authors read this divergence through a design-authenticity lens, noting that a sustainability claim is warranted by an artefact’s composition rather than its description, while explicitly making no claim about intent, since the record does not settle whether the brand itself made a recyclability claim or whether the reading is the analysts’ own.

The fourth case, the KAFT x Blender capsule, translates the visual idiom of 3D digital tooling onto fabric. Three unisex regular-fit cotton T-shirts, CUBISION in black, MONKE in blue and GEO NODE in off-white, were produced using direct printing, which images a digital file onto fabric without an intermediate screen stencil, preserving the visual language of digital rendering in a single translation. The brand reported sales approximately 2.4 times higher than an internal comparator product and roughly 2.5 times more page visits on the campaign page than a brand-wide reference, but the comparator product and the time-matched window were not specified, and the academic authors did not independently verify the figures. The study reports them as illustrative of brand-internal aggregation, not as evidence of any causal effect of design on consumer behaviour.

What distinguishes the paper methodologically is its naming of what the authors call the designer-side/user-side evidentiary asymmetry: the structural separation, in industry-collaborative design research, between what a brand can document, namely design intent, technical specification and production execution, and what it can only claim, namely user-side outcomes such as narrative transportation, emotional attachment and use-phase longevity, which would require consumer surveys, longitudinal wardrobe studies and life-cycle assessment the brand does not deploy. The seven-author insider-outsider structure operationalised this principle: the three KAFT-affiliated co-authors, one of whom is a co-founder and managing partner with an ownership interest, verified only factual claims about production history and technical processes, while the four academic authors performed and reviewed all interpretive coding, firewalled from the constructs in which commercial interest would most plausibly bias inference. Analytical coding was performed by the first author alone, so inter-coder reliability could not be computed, a limitation the authors state explicitly.

The study is equally guarded on sustainability. It notes that the use-phase contribution to apparel’s environmental impact is governed largely by how long garments are kept and worn, and that specialty interventions such as custom-developed fabrics, jacquard-woven labelling and limited-edition runs tend to raise per-unit production intensity. Whether longer retention offsets that higher intensity is an empirical question the study cannot answer: no life-cycle assessment was conducted, no longitudinal wardrobe data were collected, and the sign of the net-impact calculation is declared indeterminate. The authors specify three falsifiable follow-up studies, a consumer-survey study of attachment using established instruments, a longitudinal wardrobe study tracking keep-discard behaviour over 24 to 36 months, and a comparative cradle-to-grave life-cycle assessment of a specialty case against a matched standard alternative, parameterised by the longitudinal use-phase data. Until that programme is carried out, the framework’s user-side and sustainability outcomes remain hypotheses rather than findings, and the typology itself, derived from a single mid-priced Turkish brand, awaits comparative replication across other brands and product categories.

Subject of Research: A multiple-case study of how a Turkish apparel brand translates narrative intent into fabric, decoration and garment construction, and the evidentiary limits of industry-collaborative design research.

Article Title: Wearable narratives: material, technical, and structural integration in industrial apparel—a practice-based multiple-case study

Article References: Ceylan, Ö., Taş, I., Kılıç, N., Aydın, E., Arpacı, A. E., Yeşilbaş, E. G., & Çırak, N. (2026). Wearable narratives: material, technical, and structural integration in industrial apparel—a practice-based multiple-case study. Fashion and Textiles, 13(1), Article 36. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40691-026-00488-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40691-026-00488-5

Keywords: wearable narrative, apparel design, textile engineering, sociosemiotics, emotional durability, narrative integration, KAFT, design typology, sustainability trade-off, mono-materiality, practice-based design research, evidentiary asymmetry