Evaluation of a garment fit model using AHP

Garment fit on a body model is an important factor for designing comfortable, functional and well fitting garments. Nowadays the virtual prototyping of garments provides high potential for design, product development and marketing processes. Previous examinations of garment fit to the body in a real and virtual environment were merely focused on expert evaluation by way of a descriptive comparison of proper and improper areas for fitting. Therefore the problem area in our research was to examine the fit of a skirt on a live model and on virtual models such as parametric and scanned body models in order to propose which virtual human body is the most suitable where garment fit is concerned. The paper also discusses the fit of a skirt on an individual part of the human body with respect to predefined areas. A numerical study with a questionnaire survey database was conducted with the aim of selecting the best model to assess the fit of a skirt to the human body, and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to evaluate the questionnaire results. The results obtained confirm that the design is most important factor when evaluating a skirt’s fit to the body. Furthermore results confirmed that the hips and abdomen areas were the most important for evaluators when assessing as kirt’s fit to the body.