The Logo Works has been decorating fabrics since 1995 so we have a wealth of experience when it comes to the embroidery and printing of client logos and designs on to all kinds of clothing predominantly used as uniforms. But when we recently came across an article saying that humans have been decorating fabric for more than 34,000 years it made our 31 years in the business seem rather modest.
Long before the printed T-shirt, embroidery machine or digital printer, people were already finding ways to add colour, pattern, identity and meaning to fabric.
The technology has changed enormously. The idea hasn’t.
~34,000 BC: Natural dyeing
At Dzudzuana Cave in present-day Georgia, archaeologists discovered some of the world’s oldest known flax fibres, including fibres that had been coloured, providing remarkable evidence of humans altering the appearance of textile fibres tens of thousands of years ago.
~5,000-3,000 BC: Decorative stitching
As textile making became more sophisticated, stitching increasingly became decorative as well as functional. Early traditions of embellished textiles developed across ancient cultures, including Egypt and Asia, laying the foundations for what we now know as embroidery.
~2,000 BC onward: Resist dyeing
Sections of fabric were protected from dye through binding, wax and other techniques. These methods became the ancestors of processes including batik, tie-dye and other forms of resist decoration.
~500 BC-200 AD: Block printing
Carved wooden blocks allowed patterns and images to be repeatedly applied to fabric. India and China became important centres for the development of textile block printing, a technique that is still practised today.
~500-1000 AD: Advanced stencilling
Stencils made it possible to produce increasingly detailed and repeatable textile designs, particularly throughout Asia.
~900-1200 AD: Early screen and stencil techniques
Craftspeople in China and Japan developed sophisticated ways of supporting intricate stencils with mesh and fine material, important technological ancestors of screen printing.
Then textile decoration entered the modern industrial era.
1907: Modern screen printing
Samuel Simon patented a silk-screen printing process in England, helping establish the foundations of modern commercial screen printing.
1910s-1930s: Photo-stencil screen printing
Light-sensitive emulsions allowed detailed artwork to be photographically transferred onto screens, dramatically expanding what printers could reproduce.
1960s: The printed T-shirt takes off
Improved machinery, inks and mass production, combined with music, surf, sport, art and popular culture, helped turn the screen-printed T-shirt into a global product.
But the evolution didn’t stop there.
1980s-1990s: Computerised embroidery
One of the world’s oldest decoration techniques entered the digital age. Digitised artwork and multi-head embroidery machines transformed embroidery into a precise, high-volume commercial process.
1996: Direct-to-Garment printing (DTG)
Early commercial DTG technology emerged, allowing digital artwork to be printed directly onto garments without requiring a separate screen for each colour.
Through the 2000s and 2010s, improvements in printheads, pretreatment and water-based pigment inks made DTG increasingly viable for commercial garment production.
~2010s: Direct-to-Film printing (DTF)
Digital designs could now be printed onto transfer film, combined with adhesive and heat-transferred onto garments.
~2020 onward: DTF becomes mainstream
DTF adoption accelerated rapidly because of its ability to reproduce detailed, multi-colour designs across a wide variety of garments, fabrics and production quantities.
So, in very simple terms, the evolution looks something like this:
From coloured flax fibres more than 34,000 years ago to today’s digital decoration technology, every generation has found a new way to achieve essentially the same thing: turning clothing into something more than clothing.
Fast forward to today, and whilst the equipment may have changed, the creativity behind decorating clothing hasn’t.
The Logo Works specialises in the supply of uniforms so for us “fabric decoration” mainly means adding our customer’s logo to garments. The type of garment usually dictates the method of decoration. A business shirt would be embroidered; a jacket is usually embroidered; polo shirts are mostly embroidered but can be screen printed and dtf printed; t-shirts are screen printed or dtf printed. Our job is to guide you through the process.
* this article borrows from OCC Apparel Newsletter August 2026