The consumer’s enhanced awareness of garment quality, appearance, and related eco-safety production manufacture means that not only shell fabrics, but also accessory materials should be paid much more attention. Interlining is the one of the most important and state of the art accessory materials that currently lacks review and exploration. This article comprehensively demonstrates an organizational integration of interlinings which includes their history, classification, manufacture, characteristic, properties, function, fusing technology and application. In addition, the article highlights a new innovation of printable interlining, which could replace the traditional fusible interlinings because of its cost-effectiveness, its simple process and its environmentally-friendly nature.

Interlining is a layer of fabric inserted between the shell fabric and the lining of a garment to give clothing a suitable appearance and stability. It has a long history and exists in diverse forms based on its substrate and application. The most well-known and widely used interlinings are fusible interlinings and this article mainly focused on fusible interlinings.

Although previous research articles concerning the properties and functions of shell fabrics fuse different interlinings by suitable fusing technology [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], there is a lack of integral comprehension of the knowledge of fusible interlinings. This review article will systematically summarize state-of-the-art progress in the history, classification, manufacture, characteristics, properties, function, fusing technology and application of these materials. Among the abundant research work devoted to interlinings, the big challenge of extending their properties into better quality and cost-effectively fabric has long been recognized as the core issue for practical applications. Researchers never stop their forward process on the way to the new areas of material and technology, and this has led to printable interlinings being created in place of traditional fusible interlinings. The major knowledge and techniques are reviewed here in order to give helpful guidance for future research