Evaluating the Tactile Comfort of Sportswear Fabrics

Nowadays, producers of sportswear are focused on the development of innovative products with an added value. The investigations covering the perception of tactile comfort are an important topic in the sportswear research domain, due to the fact that consumer purchases of sportswear garments are driven by visual and sensory perception. Therefore, additional efforts have to be done towards the interpretation of sportswear attributes with respect to human senses. The aim of this manuscript is to determine the attributes describing the tactile comfort for a set of sportswear knitted fabrics with the participation of a trained group of assessors, i.e. applying the subjective method. In the focus of the experimental part are the following fabric attributes: stiffness, roughness, stretchability and thickness. The tactile comfort of the knitted fabrics is evaluated using non-aged and artificially aged fabrics and conclusions regarding the effect of ageing are brought.