The Bold New Face of Textiles
The College of Textiles plowed through tough times to become a high-tech star.
Arash Kasebi and his classmates at NC State’s College of Textiles have heard the questions. Why would anyone go to college to study textiles? Isn’t that industry dead? Haven’t the jobs moved overseas? Kasebi’s mom wondered why he wanted to make jeans for a living. Others say they have been ribbed about making minimum wage or asked if they were willing to move to China to find a job. KC Keesee, a recent graduate from Mooresville, N.C., gave up trying to explain it. “My mom still doesn’t understand,” he says.
Mom and Dad need not worry. The students at the College of Textiles are going to be fine.
The textiles industry is thriving, and not just overseas. The U.S. jobs are different than they were a generation ago, when manufacturing took place at textile mills all over North Carolina and other Southern states, and young college graduates took jobs as shift supervisors and worked their way up to plant manager. Even if few of today’s graduates end up punching a clock at the local mill, there are now plenty of textiles jobs to be found.
Textiles have gone high-tech, and can be found in everything from medical devices to protective gear for the military and firefighters. We are surrounded by textiles — both woven and nonwoven — from the carpet and cushions in our homes to the seat belts and air filters in our cars or the composite material used to build airplanes. It won’t be long before our clothes will have embedded technology that will measure heart rates and monitor breathing. Andre West, an assistant professor of textile and apparel, technology and management, argues that technology is even moving fashion today, with outdoor and performance apparel companies like Nike, Under Armour and The North Face taking center stage. “The technology that goes into those garments is unbelievable,” he says.
And there is no better place to develop that technology than NC State. Just ask Jeremy Wall ’14, who majored in fashion and textile management and has been described as the “Steve Jobs of the Outdoor Industry” after he founded a company that embeds programmable lights into clothing to make cyclists and runners more visible to motorists. “The College of Textiles,” he says, “is cranking out people who are building the future.”
Making Its Own History
The College of Textiles has a long history of defying the odds and figuring out ways to stay ahead of the curve. Today, it’s the only college of textiles in the United States. The first textiles professor was hired in 1899 — just 10 years after NC State opened its doors — to help an industry that had “reached the limit of what can be done with picked-up knowledge and ignorant labor.” That was part of the appeal made to state senators by Daniel Augustus Tompkins, a textiles executive in Charlotte, N.C., who led the charge to establish a textiles program at NC State. (The first textiles building was later named Tompkins Hall.)
The college has enjoyed plenty of success through the years. Its graduates continued to land jobs during the Great Depression and, in 1954, the college developed the first synthetic aorta. But it may have faced its toughest test when the textiles industry struggled in the latter part of the 20th century, with mills shutting their doors as manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas in search of cheaper labor. Nearly 1 million textile and apparel jobs were lost in the U.S. from 1973 to 1996, a greater decline than that of other manufacturing sectors. While Georgia Tech, Auburn and Clemson decided to scale back their textiles programs, NC State stayed the course. Clemson, whose annual football game against NC State is known as the Textile Bowl, has folded its few remaining polymer and fiber chemistry classes into its College of Engineering.
“Our success has been partly by doubling down when everybody else bailed,” says David Hinks, a professor of textile chemistry who became dean in 2016 after two years as interim dean.
And Hinks, who grew up in the English town of Derby, has dreams of expanding the college’s reach yet again. “We can grow our global brand,” he says. “We can offer opportunities for people to get expert technical knowledge and training and design knowledge through our college, through online programs. We can become the preferred global provider of textile education.”
that will help improve posture.
The college’s relationship with the textiles industry has been critical to its ability, as Hinks likes to say, to punch above its weight. The industry initially donated more than $25,000 worth of machinery to get the college started in what is now Holladay Hall, and later raised more than $700,000 in three years after forming the N.C. Textile Foundation in 1942 to support the college. It has since provided almost $35 million for scholarships, faculty and student recruitment efforts and other programs. The industry has also made sure that the college always has the most up-to-date equipment.
“The thing that binds us together is that we are really servicing an industry,” says Jesse Jur ’07 PHD, an assistant professor in textile engineering, chemistry and science. “No other college services an industry.”
A Holistic Approach
The college’s 58 faculty members work with almost 1,000 undergraduate students across five programs — fashion and textile design, fashion and textile management, polymer and color chemistry, textile engineering and textile technology. The college also has a little more than 200 graduate students.
Students in the college’s design programs are learning the latest in the digital printing of fabrics, and studying abroad in places like Milan, Hong Kong and London. Students in textile technology and engineering are working on projects to help companies like Patagonia reduce their apparel’s impact on the environment and help a medical device company in Florida create customized sutures for arthroscopic surgery. They are figuring out if different types of seams in emergency fire shelters made with fiberglass and silica might offer better protection. Professors are developing garments for firefighters that will be more resistant to unhealthy particles in smoke, designing fabrics to protect against the Zika virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses, and using shellfish to create a fiber that can stem blood flow and improve the ability to treat battlefield wounds.
“I think one of the things we’ve done well in the college, is we have not just moved with the times, but moved ahead of the times,” says Blanton Godfrey, the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished University Professor of Textile & Apparel Technology & Management and a former dean of the college.
Students say the college’s small size, and location in a corner of Centennial Campus, is one of its strengths. Class sizes are small, and professors often know students by name. “You become best friends with everyone,” says Kaylee Smith ’17, a recent graduate from Greenville, N.C., who majored in textile engineering. “You would have to try not to succeed in this college.” The statistics bear that out — more than 97 percent of recent graduating classes landed jobs or went on to graduate school.
Scientifically Speaking
The first textile students took courses such as Cotton Machinery, Graphics of Mechanism and Textile Chemistry & Dyeing (not to mention four years of Military Drill). While the curriculum has changed substantially through the years — particularly when the college recognized it needed to shift away from its emphasis on manufacturing — students still take courses in textile chemistry, physics and calculus. Students, including those in fashion and design, graduate with a bachelor of science degree.
“Having that science background, having that yarn formation and chemistry, all played a role in my career,” says Caitlyn Holt ’12, ’13 MS, who majored in fashion and textile management and now works in Greensboro, N.C., as a product development manager at Cone Denim, a subsidiary of the International Textile Group. She designs denim fabric for companies like Levi’s and Wrangler, and was involved with the denim used in the Ralph Lauren jeans worn by U.S. athletes during the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics. “Instead of approaching it from just a design perspective, I look at how this will affect the overall business.”
Or as Roger Barker, the Burlington Chair in Textile Technology, puts it, “We always come back to the basics. A fiber is still a fiber. Our students are provided the foundation in the sciences and math.”
Still, Barker appreciates the importance of providing students with easy access to the latest technology and industry thinking. He is the director of the Textile Protection and Comfort Center (T-PACC), a laboratory where faculty and students determine how fabrics, apparel and other items will hold up to fire, heat and other extreme conditions. The lab was named by Popular Science as one of the 10 Most Awesome College Labs in the country, largely because of Pyro-Man, a life-size mannequin that is blasted with fire to test the performance of gear for firefighters and other first responders.
“You actually are able to see an outcome that makes a difference in safety,” Barker says. “That’s what we do at the College of Textiles. You can’t go anywhere else in the world to do that.”
Wall says what he learned at the college was essential to launching Lumenus, which embeds lights into clothing and backpacks that can be synced with the GPS in a mobile phone to blink when making turns or stopping. He spent much of his senior year working with professors to develop his idea — born from a close call with a car while he was riding his bike to class — and once he graduated, he was able to engage with business executives, designers, plant managers and engineers at apparel companies. Wall, 25, has a deal with Timbuk2, an outdoor apparel company, to put his company’s technology into one of its backpacks in time for this year’s holiday sales season.
“Because I was so holistically trained, I can have high-level conversations with anyone in their company,” he says. “They were, ‘Holy cow, this kid knows his stuff. He’s not just a college student with a good idea.’”
Connecting Class with Corporate
The diversity of what the college is involved with — and the holistic approach that the college takes in educating its students — is evident in a large industrial space on the first floor. Small work tables are spread haphazardly throughout the room, with retractable black power cords hanging from the ceiling. This is where 78 students, all seniors majoring in either textile technology or textile engineering, spend the better part of their final year as an undergraduate. They work in teams on real-world projects that require them to call on the technical and scientific training they have received. Their clients include names like HanesBrands, Eastman Chemical, Under Armour and the U.S. Army Research Office.
Most of the teams are already at work when Russell Gorga, one of the two professors, walks in a few minutes late one day. He drops a plastic bag of leftover Halloween candy on a table, and then tells the students that he will be doing some work on his laptop if they need him for any problems. “I’m going to get some candy,” says one of the students rushing up to the bag in the center of the room. “This will go great with the Toaster Strudel I had for lunch.”
The students, dressed in T-shirts, football jerseys, leggings and shorts, are working on projects that could make a difference in the bottom line for the companies that are sponsoring them. “This is probably the most relevant work we’ve ever done,” says Andrew Hoyle, a senior from Cherryville, N.C. “It’s a lot of career prep, that’s for sure,” chimes in Jacob Stinson, a textile engineering major from Wilkesboro, N.C., who is sucking on a Tootsie Pop from Gorga’s bag of goodies.
Hoyle and Stinson are part of a team charged with analyzing absorbent material that could be used in athletic apparel for a start-up company outside of Atlanta, Ga. “They want hard results,” says Hoyle. “It’s not just a school project we’re doing. It could help the company.”
Student projects in past years have led to the development of an elephant collar that creates a buzzing sound — like that of a bee — when the animal is in danger of tromping into a village and a bite sleeve that the U.S. Army uses to train dogs for combat situations. This year, student projects include customized digital printing on socks and using acetate, most commonly found in cigarette filters, to make a bralette.
“This is not an academic exercise,” says Gorga, an associate professor in textile engineering, chemistry and science. “To me, this is the real world. We want to solve problems. And we want everyone to learn from it and get something out of it.”
Remember Arash Kasebi, whose mother was worried that he was destined to a career making jeans? He’s part of a team working on a project for Arthrex, a medical device company in Florida. The students have developed a process that Arthrex can use to make customized sutures for arthroscopic surgery. Another student, Keegan Cerwinski, is working on a project to determine how many microfibers are released from Patagonia clothing during the laundry process. They designed a filtration system and used a $5,000 computerized washer to give Patagonia data that the company may use to try to minimize the microfibers going into the water system. “Textiles are in everything,” Cerwinski says. “We work with industry, and all the resources we need are here.”
Gorga and Jur work with companies who want to tap into the students’ energy and ideas and make it clear that the companies have to make their executives available to the students. The students, in turn, are required to regularly update the sponsors on their work. “It’s not like we’re just college students playing around,” says Smith, who is working on a project for HanesBrands to develop an auto-adjusting bra strap. “We are talking to vice presidents and other executives.”
Gorga interrupts the class one day to introduce Shawn Springs, a former NFL player who founded a company that developed technology that can be used in football helmets to absorb contact and protect against injuries. He was considering sponsoring a project, and spent some time walking around the room and talking with students. “It was incredible,” he said afterward. “That blew my mind. I really didn’t know how many different things they were involved in. Textiles are amazing.”
Photography by Marc Hall ’20 MA, NC State
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