Teijin Frontier, the Teijin group's fibre-product converting company, has developed a new fabric, boasting a premium black colour, that is expected to meet demands for lightweight, easy-care formal wear.

“Up to now, it was difficult to reduce a fabric’s weight while retaining its deep black colour for use as formal wear,” the manufacture explains. “The reason was that the fabric had to be shrunk to prevent light reflection and increase its density to achieve a deep black colour, making it unsuitable for formal black wear by its weight.”

Teijin Frontier’s solution is designed to optimise the fibre, the fabric structure and the post-dyeing processing technology in lightweight, premium black fabric. To realise a premium black colour, the company developed a new polyester combined-filament yarn by incorporating a new polymer technology and a new yarn-processing technology with orientation control.

Light reflection was suppressed by lowering the refractive index and using thin-film fabrication processing to make the yarn bulky, so low transparency is achieved without shrinkage of the fabric.

In the development stage, Teijin Frontier produced a deep black colour by greatly shrinking the yarn, but this raised the fibre’s density and increased its contact area, which led to whitening due to friction. Later, however, the thread structure was redesigned for less shrinkage and finer yarn threads. Reduced shrinkage and greater bulkiness decreased whitening surface.

Teijin Frontier is now exploring marketing opportunities and sample sales for formal black wear. Annual sales are expected to reach JPY 200 million (US$ 1.76 million) by the fiscal year ending in March 2020.

Teijin is a technology-driven group offering advanced solutions in the areas of environmental value; safety, security and disaster mitigation; and demographic change and increased health consciousness.

Its main fields of operation are high-performance fibres such as aramid, carbon fibres and composites, healthcare, films, resin and plastic processing, polyester fibres, products converting and IT. The group has some 170 companies and around 19,000 employees spread out over 20 countries worldwide.

www.teijin.com