Hoe blijft een geautomatiseerde industrie menselijk?

With the advent of fast fashion and textile giants able to design, produce and distribute enormous quantities of clothing in a matter of days, the perception of clothing production has completely changed.

Today, mass production is often depicted as a futuristic factory. Seamstresses, associated with the nostalgia of a craft workshop, seem to have no place in the process that fills the shopping streets of every city with the latest trends.

Public perception often sees this speed as a triumph of technological efficiency. This ignores the fact that in the industrial reality of 2026, the basis of this agility is still a human workforce, which is under high pressure and is often invisible.

When one speaks of “automation” in today’s textile industry, it is not about the disappearance of human labor, but about its transformation and coexistence with technological systems in hybrid environments. Furthermore, the degree of automation varies considerably from company to company, depending on the size and level of technological investments.

In this context, the Austrian company Silana stands out. It is one of the few European players making relevant progress in the automation of clothing manufacturing. Their technology focuses on capabilities that could redefine the industry in the long term, although it also highlights the structural and technical limitations that still impact the sector.

Not handmade, but always with hands

Unlike other sectors such as the automotive industry, where the stiffness of materials allows for constant millimeter precision, automation in fashion is confronted with the nature of textiles.

While a piece of metal retains its shape no matter how it is manipulated by a robotic arm, “fabric is a flexible and deformable material, meaning it changes shape unpredictably when handled,” explains Michael Mayr, co-founder and chief operating officer of Austrian company Silana, speaking to FashionUnited. Silana develops robotic systems for automated clothing production.

The three-dimensional behavior of the fabric during sewing poses a complex challenge, both mechanically and computationally. Unlike machines, human operators work with a tactile feedback system. This allows them to adjust pressure, tension and alignment in milliseconds and in real time.

Mimicking this skill in automated systems requires a complex, specialized architecture hardware. Think of soft grippers, suction systems and synchronized transport mechanisms that keep the material stable during the sewing process. This challenge increases with light or stretchy fabrics such as silk or elastane, where deformations and shifts can cause structural defects that are difficult to correct.

The company states that the historic lack of automation in the sewing industry has contributed to the consolidation of long and complex supply chains, with low flexibility and a structural tendency towards overproduction. Automation of this segment could, in their view, reconfigure production logic towards more local and on-demand models.

Silana’s modus operandi is based on progressive development of robotic capabilities. “We follow a skills-based approach: the robot can perform individual actions such as manipulating fabric, aligning pieces or sewing. These can be recombined to produce different types of garments,” explains Mayr.

Currently, Silana focuses on basic garments such as T-shirts and has not yet expanded its technology to other categories. However, under the skills-based approach, the system can perform individual actions such as sewing, aligning or manipulating fabric. These could be combined in the future to produce new types of garments.

Although the company is still in the pilot phase, it describes it as “highly advanced”. According to the management team, the automation process is not a correction of previous mistakes, but the natural evolution of multiple technological and structural factors. In this regard, the company states that they are already “producing garments in-house and plan to deliver our first production system this year.”

“We plan to deliver our first production system this year”

In this scenario, Silana is at an advanced stage within the technological maturity of the textile sector. Their proposal points to a future of more flexible, distributed and on-demand production. However, that horizon is still far removed from the real conditions that dominate the industry.

The gap is not only technological, but also structural. The sector continues to be influenced by decades of optimization based on cheap labor, economies of scale and highly globalized supply chains. Add to this the inherent complexity of handling deformable materials, the limited maturity of robotics applied to textiles and the high cost sensitivity of the sector. “Solutions are only implemented if they match or significantly reduce existing costs,” says Mayr.

Only a minority, usually companies with an established innovation culture, choose early adoption to gain competitive advantage. In terms of scale, Silana’s solution is considered feasible from relatively moderate volumes, around a hundred thousand units per year. The mid- and long-term goal is an on-demand production model with the capacity to produce different styles in the same system, reducing the minimum order size to almost a single-unit model.

What is automated and what is not

Knitting technology, and in particular the wholegarmentsystems, has established itself as one of the most relevant advancements in automation in the textile industry. Unlike conventional ready-to-wear, this system builds the garment directly in three dimensions from the thread, a production logic that radically redefines the production process.

For everything else, however, automation in fashion remains largely patchy. Today, it is mainly efficient at the ends of the process — pre-production and post-production — while the assembly in between remains largely dependent on human intervention.

The cutting process has probably reached the highest level of technological sophistication. Automated laser or knife cutting systems, integrated with pattern optimization algorithms, provide precision unattainable by the human eye and contribute significantly to the reduction of textile waste. This equipment can cut multiple layers of fabric simultaneously from digital files from CAD environments, eliminating the use of paper patterns and significantly speeding up production prep times.

In the denim segment, automation has made a qualitative leap thanks to the technology of the Spanish company Jeanologia. Their systems have replaced traditionally manual and risky processes — such as sanding or sandblasting — with laser applications that sublimate the fabric’s indigo to create wear effects. The result is not only an automation of the aesthetic finishing of the garment, but also a profound transformation in terms of occupational safety and sustainability, with an almost complete reduction in water consumption in these stages of the process.