Clothing Printer: The Innovative Way We May Get Our Clothes In 2050

Have you ever stopped to think about how inefficient the process of getting and maintaining our clothes is? It’s a bizarre thing to consider, but the process of shopping and then storing our clothes in a closet seems a bit antiquated, not to mention the energy and space a washing machine and dryer uses. We’ve already reported that 40% of women buy almost all their clothes online, and this clothing printer could be the next step in optimizing that process.

According to industrial designer Joshua Harris, this could be the way of the future. Through his research, Joshua determined that by the year 2050, we won’t be shopping the way we do now. Not only will we not have room for washers and dryers in the smaller spaces where we’ll live, but buying clothes at retail stores to then store in closets will be an activity of the past.

This clothing printer seems like a specialized, sophisticated, futuristic 3D printer to me, so in a way, I can actually see this happening. You can follow the images below which paint a picture for how all this would work, but basically, we’d be using a clothing printer like this to print and recycle our clothes each day.

The role of fashion retailers would shift. Instead of selling clothes in stores, they would sell their cartridges of materials and digital designs to their customers. The user would pop the cartridge in the printer and click on the design – and voila, the outfit for the day would come right out of the printer.

When you are finished wearing that outfit, simply feed it back through the clothing printer where it will be taken apart, cleaned and returned to thread which can be used to create another design. A whole new world would open up for the clothing industry. Instead of selling clothes in actual stores or in the traditional way online, retailers would take advantage of new opportunities to sell us what we need for our clothing printers. As a woman who doesn’t like shopping, I have to admit, this sounds really, really good. It’s like clothes shopping would finally get geeky!