By Graham K. Rogers

With over 90 years of diplomatic ties between Japan and Turkey, there are a number of celebrations being held in Istanbul to mark the anniversary, including the "HELLO ISTANBUL!" fashion show to be held in the Esma Sultan on 11 October. The historic venue, which is on the shores of the Bosporus was named after the daughter of a Sultan of Turkey.

Epson is supporting the designer Kansai Yamamoto as it did with his earlier event at the Victoria and Albert Museum, "Fashion in Motion" show in London last year. For the current show, Epson has spent four weeks reproducing 15 creations combining traditional Japanese designs and ultra-modern styles.

The output was printed using "Genesta inks on the Monna Lisa textile printing system developed by Robustelli of Italy and using Epson's inkjet, and on Epson's SureColor F7100 series and SureColor FP-30160 textile printers."

The output was around 800 m² of vibrant designs on fabrics that included polyester, cotton and silk.

Kansai Yamamoto said of the show,

Recently, a number of new technologies have come to present valid alternatives to the traditional Japanese crafts of dyeing, weaving and sewing. I would include Epson's textile printing in the top class of these technologies, along with fabrics that help control body temperature and technologies that can create 3D knitted designs in one go.

For this show, I decided to evoke the traditional indigo colors and red sashes once worn by women performing agricultural in Akita, northern Japan. To achieve this I needed Epson to recreate that traditional indigo color. It requires an incredibly high level of printing technology to create this color, but I think the whole process has proceeded very smoothly indeed.

The fabrics were printed using dye-sublimation, direct-to-fabric techniques. A brief video of the Epson textile printers used to create Kansai Yamamoto designs is available on YouTube.

More information is available at the Epson Global site

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.