Textile is China's traditional advantage industry, covering raw materials manufacturing, textile manufacturing, clothing production and other links. After years of development, China has established the world's most complete independent modern textile industry system, textile industry manufacturing capacity and international trade scale has long ranked first in the world.

Today, enabled by new technologies, the textile industry has achieved innovative development. Duan Xiaoping, vice president of the China Textile Industry Federation, said that the new quality productivity of the textile industry is driving profound changes in the industrial ecology.

Strengthen independent innovation

In the recently held 2025 China International Clothing and Apparel Expo (Spring), a number of clothing brands, science and technology enterprises competed to show the latest achievements of science and technology to enable the textile and apparel industry, reflecting the new development trend of the textile industry.

Under the guidance of innovation, the textile industry is speeding up to the high-end field. Sun Ruizhe, president of the China Textile Industry Federation, said that new technologies, new materials and new products continue to emerge, forming a strong support for strategic industries and future industries. The self-sufficiency rate of high-performance fibers, high-end equipment, and high-end industrial textiles continued to increase. Synthetic fiber monomer raw materials, green dyes, additives, oils and other large areas to achieve independent technological breakthroughs and import substitution.

Multifunctional nanofiber respirator film is a kind of thin film material with microporous structure, which has the properties of water and moisture permeability, wind and heat preservation, chemical inertness, high flame retardancy and high and low temperature resistance. Wang Mingyu, sales director of Shanghai Hanpu New Material Technology Co., LTD., said that in recent years, the company has increased its research and development investment in the field of enhanced multi-functional nanofiber respiratory membrane material technology, successfully developed and produced a number of materials, and built a complete product and service system based on independent and original core technology, core products and system solutions.

"With the popularity of outdoor sports, outdoor equipment consumer demand is strong, and enterprises have ushered in new development opportunities." Next, we will further increase the independent innovation of textile materials and develop new products that meet the needs of different scenarios." Wang Mingyu introduced that in the field of mass consumption, multi-functional nanofiber respiratory film can meet the needs of snow and ice sports ski suits, storm jackets, tents, backpacks, sleeping bags, fishing clothing and other products.

To achieve independent innovation, we cannot rely only on enterprises to fight alone. The adoption of industry-university-research cooperation mode to improve product quality and enhance market competitiveness has become a new trend in the development of textile industry.

Qu Jing, vice president of Guangzhou Huimei Fashion Group Co., LTD., introduced that in order to further improve the comfort of wearing, the company has launched research and development cooperation with the Cotton Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences for raw materials. After cultivation, the raw cotton produced has good quality consistency, less impurity and low three threads. The company also joined hands with the National Cotton Industry Alliance to open the digital intelligence and high standardization application of the whole industry chain from seeds to cotton, yarn and fabric.

Towards intelligence

"AI is becoming an important driving force for the development and change of the textile and garment industry." Xie Qing, executive vice president of the China Clothing Association, said that driven by new technologies such as AI, big data and intelligent manufacturing, the industry is developing in the direction of intelligence, personalization and high efficiency.

At the 2025 China International Clothing Expo (Spring) site, the reporter saw that designers are using AI for clothing design: After inputting the instruction "Design a group of new sports sweatshirts in line with the current trend", the system captures the data of social media and e-commerce platforms in real time, generates dozens of fashion design sketches, and automatically matches the physical properties and version parameters of the fabric through a high-precision 3D simulation engine to generate a number of clothes that can be reviewed immediately and can be directly connected to production. Click on one of the sketches to display the cost range, retail price suggestions, core selling points and other information of the hoodie.

This is a general AI agent DeepModa beta version developed by Style3D (Lindi Technology) for the fashion industry, which can show the whole process of intelligent creation according to user needs.

According to reports, AI can also complete the automatic analysis of the design manuscript, combined with the version database, to generate a version suitable for a variety of body types; After rehearsing the effect of the sample through 3D physical simulation, the system automatically generates a standardized process sheet and synchronizes it to the factory system.

"Although 3D technology has been used by some companies to improve design efficiency, and AI is emerging in the fashion field, there are still many challenges: the design process relies on manual modification, the production process information is fragmented, and the marketing return rate is high." Liu Chen, founder and CEO of Style3D, said that the deep integration of AI and 3D is the development direction of fashion industry digitalization. 3D technology builds a digital twin of the clothing, while AI makes it smarter. The combination of the two can solve long-term pain points such as high industry fragmentation, data fragmentation, and talent shortage.

In addition to creative design, AI also empowers the development of textile and garment enterprises in many aspects. Xie Qing said that in the production and manufacturing process, AI can optimize supply chain management, improve production efficiency and reduce inventory pressure. In the marketing and sales links, AI can also enhance the consumer experience through precision marketing, personalized recommendation and other ways to help enterprises achieve more efficient market reach.

Taking Feishu as an example, the product reshaped the whole process of design, production and marketing through "AI+ collaboration" tools, and has served multiple clothing brands, covering user insight, production supply chain management, global marketing and other scenarios. Fu Xuedong, general manager of Feishu consumer and medical health industry, said that artificial intelligence technology helps enterprises optimize supply chain management, promote clothing production from "scale manufacturing" to "small order fast return" model, to achieve rapid matching from demand to production, and improve the response speed of the supply chain.

AI is also becoming more widely used in brand stores. The relevant person in charge of Fei Book consumer industry solutions said that the store application is mainly reflected in intelligent shopping guide, sales analysis, inventory optimization and other aspects. AI can directly provide hot product recommendations, shopping guides only need to enter simple keywords, they can immediately get the best-selling style in the store, improve sales efficiency. AI can also do sales analysis, feedback customers' evaluations to the headquarters in real time, analyze which goods are selling well, which goods are lagging, and adjust display and inventory in time.

Accelerate green transformation

This year's "Government Work Report" proposed to jointly promote carbon reduction, pollution reduction and green growth, and accelerate the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development.

As a traditional industry, the textile industry has problems of high energy consumption and high pollution, which restricts the sustainable development of the industry. The establishment of a carbon footprint management system is an important step for the textile industry to accelerate green transformation and move towards sustainable development.

In December 2024, the China National Textile Industry Federation launched the compilation of a series of standards for the Carbon Footprint Management System of the Textile and Garment Industry, and the policy engine and standards are working together to help enterprises shift from carbon footprint to carbon management, improving environmental performance and market competitiveness.

Kong Yan, assistant researcher of the Sustainable Development Cooperation Department of China Textile Information Center, introduced that in order to promote the green transformation of the industry, China Textile Association has developed a data tool - LCAplus platform. The platform is a one-stop digital industrial platform for product carbon footprint assessment, certification and label promotion, which helps enterprises to conveniently manage and disclose product environmental information, optimize product design and production process, and provide a full range of digital product environmental performance services.

Previously, Ordos Group released data showing that the same weight of 200g women's fully formed knitted cashmere sweater full life cycle carbon emissions, 2023 through online e-commerce and offline sales generated carbon emissions compared to 2022 average annual decline of 2.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent. Carbon emission reduction has been achieved in raw wool acquisition, dyeing, spinning, knitting and other links, among which the carbon emission of production has decreased by 11.43%. In recent years, Erdos Group has promoted sustainable technology and process innovation in the whole industry chain of source ranch management and construction, raw material selection and manufacturing, product design and production, and brand sales and promotion, endeavoring to reduce carbon emissions and achieve low-carbon circular development.

"At present, the whole industry has formed a coordinated green transformation pattern. The transformation of the industry has broken through the stage of single innovation, and it is urgent to build a symbiotic green industrial chain ecosystem, and realize the overall leap of the industry through systematic restructuring." China Textile Industry Federation vice president Yan Yan said. (Reporter Pan Zhuoran)

Source: Economic Daily News