Fabric wrinkle, which is caused by crumpling, folding or compressing in the wearing, washing and drying process, is a vital performance characteristic as it inluences and decides the visual esthetics of a garment, as well as the appearance quality of textiles. Therefore it is of vital importance to measure and evaluate wrinkling accurately and objectively.
AATCC (American Association of Textile Chemists and Colourists)methods are most commonly used in measuring fabric wrinkle performance, which include the AATCC 66-2008 wrinkle recovery angle method and AATCC 128-2004 wrinkle grade subjective evaluation method. In the former method, wrinkles are caused by folding and compressing the fabric, while in the latter, wrinkles are caused by rotating and compressing the fabric. As for the evaluation methods, the wrinkle recovery angle from folding deformations and wrinkle grades from experts by comparing the wrinkled fabrics with standard replicas are used to characterise the wrinkle performance of fabrics, respectively.
There are such disadvantages as difficulty in distinguishing between the adjacent grades and constant disagreement concerning the results between trained experts with regard to the AATCC Test Method 128-2004. As a result of this, in the latest two decades, many efforts have been devoted to the measurement of a fabrics ability to resist
and recover from wrinkling, especially how to evaluate objectively the grades of wrinkles generated by the AATCC Test Method 128-2004.