Tokyo, Japan, 13 Nov, 2019 – Toray Industries, Inc., announced that it has developed a polyester filament fabric called “Kinari”. This new fabric takes advantage of the easy-care nature of polyester and offers excellent pleat retention and wrinkle resistance. It absorbs perspiration and dries quickly. At the same time, it is unlike conventional polyester fabrics in that it is so light, rustles like silk, and delivers an incredibly classy sheen.
Toray will launch Kinari from fall/winter 2020 for Women’s and Men’s apparel and kimonos use. It is planned to sell 200,000mts in the initial year, and expand to sales in 500,000mts by the third year.
Kinari was developed in order to respond to the customer's desire to express the finish of clothes more beautifully by going beyond the sensitive areas that are difficult to express numerically. In addition to the ease of care inherent in polyester, it is also characterized by the luxurious luster, elegant gross, airy lightness and scroop characteristic to silk that conventional polyester does not. Toray applied its NANODESIGNTM conjugate spinning technology to create Kinari, which comprises three different polymers, resulting in a unique cross-section structure. Advanced processing controls differences in heat shrinkage for each polymer to provide the required twisting under thermal treatment, with delicate space forming between fibers to add high bulkiness and moderate fluctuations to the fabric.
The desire to replicate the properties of silk has long driven the development of synthetic fibers. Toray has undertaken R&D over the past five decades not just to replicate the properties of silk but to surpass them. One early fruit of that quest was SILLOOKTM, a silky polyester fabric that delivers an outstanding quality and feel that is unattainable with natural fibers. In the Kinari development project Toray drew on years of R&D to further explore the structure and performance of silk while leveraging its NANODESIGNTM technology to create a fabric with a silky new feel.
Toray will develop Kinari for high-end zones not only Japan but overseas, and propose it as a textile material that expands the possibilities of clothing. It will respond to the diversification of people's lifestyles and support affluent lifestyles.
