By Alex Shipps

It’s hard to keep up with the ever-changing trends of the fashion world. What’s “in” one minute is often out of style the next season, potentially causing you to re-evaluate your wardrobe.

Staying current with the latest fashion styles can be wasteful and expensive, though. Roughly 92 million tons of textile waste are produced annually, including the clothes we discard when they go out of style or no longer fit. But what if we could simply reassemble our clothes into whatever outfits we wanted, adapting to trends and the ways our bodies change?

A team of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe are attempting to bring eco-friendly, versatile garments to life. Their new “Refashion” software system breaks down fashion design into modules — essentially, smaller building blocks — by allowing users to draw, plan, and visualize each element of a clothing item. The tool turns fashion ideas into a blueprint that outlines how to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing, such as a pair of pants that can be transformed into a dress.

With Refashion, users simply draw shapes and place them together to develop an outline for adaptable fashion pieces. It’s a visual diagram that shows how to cut garments, providing a straightforward way to design things like a shirt with an attachable hood for rainy days. One could also create a skirt that can then be reconfigured into a dress for a formal dinner, or maternity wear that fits during different stages of pregnancy.

“We wanted to create garments that consider reuse from the start,” says Rebecca Lin, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student, CSAIL and Media Lab researcher, and lead author on a paper presenting the project. “Most clothes you buy today are static, and are discarded when you no longer want them. Refashion instead makes the most of our garments by helping us design items that can be easily resized, repaired, or restyled into different outfits.”