Fashion Terms — the Apparel Search fashion terminology directory
Textile work runs on its own units of measure. Denier expresses the fineness of a yarn or filament, fabric yield states how much fabric a given weight of material produces, thread count counts the yarns in a woven cloth, and fabric weights tell buyers and mills how heavy a cloth is before anyone cuts it. The links on this page lead to fuller explanations of textile units of measurement and fabric weights, and to fabric utilization — how much of a cloth a garment actually uses.
Learn about textile units of measure including fabric weights. Research the meaning of denier, fabric yield, thread count, yarn length, and more.
Please visit the following for more information on this subject.
You may also find the interest in reading about Fabric Utilization here in the fashion industry terminology section.
A garment specification that omits its measurements invites expensive guessing. Yarn measures such as denier settle how fine a filament yarn is; thread count settles how densely a woven fabric is constructed; yield and weight settle how much material an order consumes and what it should cost. Mills, merchandisers and factories on different continents can only work from the same techpack if those numbers mean the same thing to all of them, which is why the industry keeps a defined set of textile units rather than describing cloth as simply light or heavy.
Weights deserve special care because one cloth can be described several ways — by the weight of a running yard, of a square yard, or in grams per square metre — and a figure without its unit is no measurement at all. Checking the unit before comparing two fabrics is the first habit of anyone who buys cloth.
Common textile units include denier for yarn fineness, fabric yield, thread count for woven fabrics, and yarn length measures, together with fabric weights.
Fabric weight determines how a cloth drapes, wears and suits a garment: the same style cut in a light cloth and a heavy cloth behaves as two different products, so weight is specified before production.
Fabric utilization is how efficiently a garment uses its cloth — the share of the fabric that ends up in the finished product rather than as cutting waste.