For digital product creation (DPC) to work, at scale, fashion needs an expanding library of digital materials that accurately represent the aesthetic and performance attributes of the real thing. For anything deeper than pure visualisation, designers and patternmakers who work in 3D rely on an understanding that the virtual fabrics they’re draping on digital fit models are going to match, as closely as possible, the behaviours of the actual materials they represent.
There is, in fact, possibly no area of fashion technology that’s closer to the old WYSIWYG acronym than digital fabrics. To justify the confidence DPC teams are asking their colleagues, partners, and buyers to place in 3D, what someone sees, on screen, needs to be what they get in their hand when a physical sample or finished product arrives – not just a visual representation, but an accurate container for physical characteristics, performance testing, certifications and everything else that stacks up between design and production.
This deep, strategic importance has placed a lot of weight on the supply side of digital fabrics. Where brands have invested heavily in digital product creation talent, tools, processes and best practices in-house, the effectiveness of that investment has also been contingent on similar up-skilling and technology investment on the part of their suppliers – from scanning hardware and software subscriptions to specialist hiring and training.
In individual cases, that push to create a reliable, robust, and accurate ongoing supply of digital fabrics has paid dividends. From the perspective of both mills and their brand partners in those situations, sharing an accurate, consistent, feature-complete digital fabric has helped to drive costs down and speed to market up, and operational alignment and communication have both improved.
But those same expectations have also placed mounting pressure on a global digitisation ecosystem, across both technology and talent, that has started to buckle under demand.
Today, even in the cases where long-term commitment to 3D is waning, fashion’s ambitions are still held back by a persistent lack of clarity and alignment around who should handle the work of scanning fabrics, what targets and quality profiles they should work to, where the ongoing cost of digitisation should reside, and what standards can provide the best coverage for allowing different 3D tools, product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms, and other systems to extract value from – and add value to – those files.
The Interline, Cotton Incorporated, New Focus Textiles, and Bakermat hosted a live event in late 2025 to talk about this disconnect between fashion’s aims for digital product creation and the practical realities of the supply side of the equation.
That discussion revealed a complicated picture. From intellectual property and security concerns, to the potential for suppliers to create a sustained competitive advantage by building out digital capabilities, the incentives are proving as difficult to reconcile as the integrations between the tools.
To take a further look behind the curtain, The Interline spoke with executives from Cotton Incorporated – who have now operated and continued to populate a free source of high-quality digital fabrics, at scale, for more than six years – to understand the technical, logistical, and mindset lessons they have learned, and to assess what fashion can take away from them..
The industry-wide upsides of offering an open-access digital fabrics library
From its launch in 2020, the Cotton Incorporated digital materials library has been an outlier: a free resource, filled with interoperable materials, in a landscape defined by closed platforms and proprietary standards. Today, the library encompasses more than 500 high-fidelity fabrics (in both native CLO and Browzwear formats) that accurately represent the composition and characteristics of real cotton or cotton-rich materials.
It has also remained free to access for the full period – something that the team here at The Interline (also a free-to-access platform) knows, from first-hand experience, is difficult to maintain. Precisely due to that open-access policy, the Cotton Incorporated library has helped to raise awareness of digital product creation workflows, and provided end users (from seasoned brand teams to emerging designers and students) with resources designed to cater to professional workflows, either in education or in real production.
Over the same timeframe, the library also became home to collaborative collections developed in partnership with upstream representatives like New Focus – the Cotton Essentials collection – and exclusive drops built with technology collaborators like Substance 3D.
As a counterpart to paid and single-brand closed platforms, the open digital materials library has become a favourite of fashion professionals who understood the importance of high-quality inputs to their digital creation processes – especially inputs that directly corresponded to real, physical materials and that, as a result, can shorten the difference between digital experimentation, design, simulation, and physical manufacturing.
For that audience, already immersed in the priorities and the practicalities of digital product creation, the value of this kind of open library was immediately apparent.
The gulf between enthusiasm and institutional adoption
But while individual designers, engineers, and practitioners who were already deeply immersed in 3D instinctively understood the value of the collections and the resource, that appreciation has not, according to the team at Cotton Incorporated, translated into organisational or institutional adoption for several reasons.
First, depending on the organisation, 3D designers are limited in their capacity to drive changes in sourcing and procurement. A designer might pull down fabrics from the Cotton Incorporated library, and use them for physically-based visualisation and simulation, only for the wider organisation to need to replace those fabrics with approved seasonal materials – even if the fibre composition of those materials was functionally identical.
Simply providing an open resource did not substitute for the need for brands to digitise their own materials, or to ask their upstream partners to provide digitised files.
Second, 3D designers are also often limited in their ability to influence the way product development and other teams downstream of them operate. The process of taking 3D design into a fully-fledged, all-digital garment engineering, fitting, and sampling process requires a level of organisational change – with appropriate cultural and technical support – that the provision of a library couldn’t cover.
And finally, while the materials offered through the Cotton Incorporated library are grounded in producible fibres and manufacturable compositions, they are intended to be used in 3D first, and are not directly linked to ready-to-order products provided by Cotton Incorporated or its members. The team believes this connection between digital file and orderable yardage will both enhance the value of each material and create a more seamless experience for the end user.
But another key factor is, the team discovered, an ongoing lack of maturity in the digital product creation ecosystem – specifically the persistent limitations that exist between the promise of a “digital twin” and the reality of what a combination of different platforms can actually deliver.
Exposing the holes in DPC ecosystem maturity
It will not be a surprise to 3D or DPC insiders that this disconnect between isolated tools and a true digital twin exists. Anyone immersed in the workflow of digital product creation will be familiar with the hand-offs, integrations, interpretations, and reconciliations that are needed to turn an initial visualisation into a complete product.
The typical digital representation of a product does not serve as a source of ground truth in all the areas that would be needed for that asset to qualify as a genuine digital twin. And there are similar limitations at the material level – both in terms of how physical materials are captured, and how the resulting files make their way (or don’t) through the product lifecycle stages that follow.
The capturing process itself is reasonably well-defined, but the infrastructure required to undertake it continuously and consistently exists in a patchwork state, between individual mills and material suppliers, regionalised hubs hosted and sponsored by digital materials libraries, and brands’ own scanning efforts, where swatches shared by suppliers are captured in-house. The price of the hardware required to capture materials, and the skills required to use it, also scale with the intended use case: a simple visual scan can be accomplished on consumer-grade hardware, or even smartphones, but archival quality scans require expensive, complex machinery to capture.
But this missing physical infrastructure and talent base is only part of the picture. At the same time, if the assets that result from this process need to have utility beyond visual representation – and to carry embedded datapoints like test and certification results, finishing details, yarn and fibre specifications, construction details, shrinkage, production provenance and more – then those assets need to not only become richer, but to become standardised in a way that ensure they can flow through the entire product journey, from 3D CAD, through PLM and enterprise resource planning (ERP), and into manufacturing.
Today, as the team at Cotton Incorporated have found, digital materials are mainly created to serve the most mature use cases, which all centre on visualisation. As a result of this emphasis on how a fabric looks, visually, all of the above data is either left on the table at the capture stage or isn’t factored into the workflows that follow.
At the same time, the ecosystem is also missing a shared rights-management system for protecting intellectual property ownership of a digital fabric – something that both mills and brands have a vested and mutual interest in working with, since it would protect both the originator of the fabric and, in the case of material development workflows, secure the status of the commissioning brand.
Without this level of integration from physical material to digital twin, the industry will, by definition, continue to miss the opportunity to create a feedback loop that would allow for ongoing improvement and recalibration, and that would provide the right incentives and the right structures for brands, manufacturers, and their material supply partners to collaborate digitally.
Finding the missing multiplier effect
After five years, and after taking account of the instances where digitisation has taken root and where it hasn’t, the Cotton Incorporated team is now considering ways to pivot the focus of the material library towards supplier chain users, using digital materials as a bridge among design, development and manufacturing partners.
While individual designers have found significant value in the resource, the experience of building and maintaining the library has demonstrated that the most impactful actions and decisions regarding material digitisation take place upstream.
For a long time, the fashion industry has leaned into the idea that successful supply chain digitisation – which encompasses material digitisation – will rely on brands adopting standards which they then pass on to their supply chain partners and support them to adopt. In practice, the data gathered by Cotton Incorporated shows the opposite: that mills, material and trim suppliers, and manufacturers who digitise materials are the most successful at applying leverage, and enabling their brand customers to then work digitally.
As part of this transition, the Cotton Incorporated library will continue to be made available to designers, but while the ecosystem and industry maturity lag behind individual adoption, Cotton Incorporated sees the most value in pairing this library with renewed investment in support for material standards, educating suppliers, and taking part in bilateral industry dialogues.
As valuable as five years and five hundred fabrics have been for a segment of the industry, it’s clear that the next stage of success and scale in digital product creation will come from enabling and supporting the wider conditions that justify the digitisation of fabrics in the first place.
For more on the role of suppliers in digital product creation, consider reading The Interline’s DPC Report 2026. And for a deeper outlook on the future of 3D and DPC initiatives as the foundations for future transformation, stay tuned for The DPC Report 2027, due at the end of this calendar year.
To explore the Cotton Incorporated digital materials library, visit the CottonWorks website.