Giles Deacon, P&G’s Global Fashion Consultant, exclusively unveiled his latest machine-washable collections at P&G Future Fabrics.

According to Deacon, “After a year of working with P&G Fabric Care I have seen their advances in fabric care. I’ve spent time with the talented team at the innovation centre in Brussels and the progress in their work there. I’ve been inspired by what Ariel and Downy can do to ensure that clothes remain beautiful long after they were designed.

“For this new collection I was inspired by the macro-trend of multi-sensorial fashions and fabrics. Aware that both Ariel and Downy have the capability to preserve and protect these fashions I set about creating designs that bring the best of each brand to life. For Ariel it was all about making first impressions last, colour, confidence and impact. For Downy I focussed on giving people the confidence to wear an item all day and feel as great in it in the evening as they did when they first put it on in the morning.”

P&G Future Fabrics brings together the world’s leading fashion and fabric experts in a feast for the senses

P&G Fabric Care exclusively revealed how it is evolving to meet multi-sensorial fashion trends and solve the challenge of maintaining clothing beauty and longevity for consumers.

Hosted in vibrant Berlin, this year’s P&G Future Fabrics – for its Fabric Care brands Ariel and Downy brought together a prestigious mix of fashion, fabrics and human psychology experts to address the latest advances in fabrics and how our own unconscious decisions affect our clothing perceptions.

Advancing P&G’s unique 3-Step Fibre SCIENCE approach to prolong and improve the sensorial properties of clothes

John Turner, P&G’s research & development director, in a keynote speech focused on why people’s preferences and perceptions toward their clothes change.

Turner revealed that P&G Fibre Scientists are introducing new advances in the 3-Step FibreSCIENCE approach; to Clean, Protect and Enhance, which focus on prolonging and improving the multi-sensorial fabric properties that influence people’s perception of their clothes: the look, the feel and the scent. The life cycle of our clothes is often cut short because these properties are not cared for properly.

Turner said, “Our closets are full of clothes,yet we only wear 20% of them 80% of the time, so why aren’t we wearing the rest? Why have we fallen out of love with a garment that we spent our hard earned money on? P&G is looking at Fabric Care from a new angle to find out the answer. We’re breaking new ground by applying latest research in the cognitive science of human perception to understand WHY we reject a garment and how our relationship with clothes changes over time. By applying this knowledge to our FibreSCIENCE expertise we are redefining what Fabric Care means for consumers and their clothes.”

Cognitive Science Meets Fashion And Fabrics

P&G Future Fabrics official partner and respected fabric trends forecaster, Première Vision, opened with a presentation given by Associate Fashion Director, Sabine Le Chatelier on fashion as a multi-sensorial experience, which illustrated how fabrics are more than visual – an alchemy of look, feel and handle or behaviour.

Also revealed was the current industry trends in textile and fabric innovation where imagination and technology are combining to produce exciting sensorial fashions that are also washable, easy to care for and sustainable.

This fashion trend towards the multi-sensorial was further explored by a presentation from leading cognitive psychologist Dr Lawrence Rosenblum, who disclosed that the last years of research in perceptual psychology has given rise to a “multi-sensory revolution”, showing that our senses are always influencing one another, and impacting our preferences and moods much more than we realize and often in ways in which we are not aware.

Rosenblum’s collaboration with P&G demonstrates how the myriad of cross-sensory influences on our experiences with our fashions – what you see, how it feels to touch, what your nose smells – impact the relationship we have with clothes and our final decision on what to wear.

Advanced Ariel works deep down at a fibre level to clean, protect, and enhance the sensorial qualities of your clothes (their look, feel and scent) and offering outstanding stain removal in ONE WASH.

It redefines what it means to care for fashion with unique FibreSCIENCE technologies that allow you to achieve the highest standard of clean to keep your fashions beautiful for longer.

Robert van Pappelendam, Vice President of P&G Fabric Care Europe, commented:

“Last year we announced that P&G’s mission is to redefine and elevate what cleaning and caring for clothes means and this year, in collaboration with our incredible partners, we’re taking that mission to another level – to explore how human psychology and cognitive behavioural analysis is helping to fuel product innovation.

“At P&G Fabric Care we constantly strive to meet people’s ever-evolving needs. From scientific research to clothes design we are increasingly aware of the benefits we can gain from greater understanding of cognitive behaviour. It’s extremely exciting to be able innovate and enhance our products at such a human level and we believe this is the key to successful product today.”