I bought a new polo shirt at Eddie Bauer and it’s big selling point is that it’s “garment-dyed”. The label that tells me this is full of warnings about how you should wash it separately at first and how the color may transfer to other stuff and various other bad things like that. But they never mentioned the point of it – like what the advantages were, why anyone would bother, etc. I presume there is some reason for all the effort, but I don’t know what it is (I only bought it cause it was on sale and a good color.)
So, anyone know what the deal is with this?
Garment dyeing (as opposed to piece dyeing) means that you dye the finished garment instead of the cloth. Apparently, this helps to prevent issues with shrinkage (although the arguments are very incomplete).
I think the real advantage is to the manufacturer; garment-dyed goods can be dyed to meet demand for a particular color much faster than dyed cloth can be woven and/or cut and sewed. Garment-dyed goods are often of uneven quality.
I’ve always really liked the look of garment-dyed clothing, but I’ve had zero luck with it. I’ve bought several garment-dyed polos from Eddie Bauer, and they all suck except for one. The colors will fade unevenly or just in spots, etc.
I was told that if you add a teaspoon of vinegar to the initial wash, it would “set” the colors, but it hasn’t worked well for me at all. I’ve given up on garment dyed stuff.
Years ago I saw some TV documentary about dying of clothing. It was a pretty boring show, but I watched it anyway. Anyway, it said that garment dying is the easiest and cheapest type of dying to do, but doesn’t do as good a job as dying the pieces before they are sewn together, which isn’t as good as dying the thread before it’s woven (or knitted), which in turn is not as good as dying the wool (or cotton) before it’s spun into thread. So it sounds like Eddy Bauer is bragging about garment dying in order to make people think it’s desireably, when actually it is an inferior type of dying. Either that or unevenly-faded clothing has become trendy.
Garment-dyed means that your shirt was dyed after it has been put together, as opposed to yarn-dyed, where the yarns (duh) were dyed before weaving or knitting into a piece or garment. One characteristic of garment-dying is that designs, if any, can be placed on the garment independently of the fabric’s weave pattern. For example, I have a garment-dyed polo shirt where the horizontal stripes have crisp edges, whereas the stripes on another of my polo shirts have less well-defined edges because they were made from different colored fabrics. It’s one way to achieve a different look, basically.
As has been mentioned already, garment-dyed clothing will fade differently from yarn-dyed clothing. In the current fashion of pre-aging your clothes (see those jeans with the stupid scuff marks on the butts and thighs), this may be seen as yet another “advantage” in the eyes of some fashion slaves – giving your clothes personality, I believe, is what the marketers will call it.
Disclamier: I am not in the fabric or fashion industry. The above comes from vaguely remembering what I read a couple of years ago.