There’s a pattern in this in which certain manufacturing innovation trajectories play a key role. For example, the growing mechanization of operations, their linking together into systems of production and the increasing attempts to take human intervention out through automation. Of course this was easier to do in some cases than others – for example one of the earliest forms of programmable control, long before the invention of the computer, was the Jacquard-card system which could control the weaving of different threads across a loom. But actually making material into various items of clothing is more difficult simply because material doesn’t have a fixed and controllable shape – so this remained increasingly a labour-intensive process.