A Study on Digital Translation Methods for Liaoning's Intangible Cultural Heritage Patterns in Winter Wear and Fashion Design Products

Abstract

Liaoning holds a large stock of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) visual material-Manchu embroidery, Liao–Jin decorative motifs, and oak-silkworm silk patterns among them. With the 15th National Winter Games approaching, demand for winter-sports cultural and creative (C&C) apparel is growing quickly. In practice, however, these patterns are hard to put to use: their craft is intricate, the ways of adapting them are few, and they do not fit the small-batch production that local small and medium-sized garment enterprises run. Drawing on fieldwork in the Xiliu and Donggang clusters and on our own work digitizing Xiuyan Manchu embroidery and Liao–Jin artifact motifs, this paper identifies four bottlenecks that arise when ICH patterns move into winter-sports C&C products. It then lays out a five-step workflow-selecting and reading the pattern, extracting its features, rebuilding it as vectors, adapting it to the garment context, and prototyping with feedback-and proposes a lightweight version of this workflow that local SMEs can actually run. In our trials it lowered both pattern-processing cost and sample difficulty without diluting the pattern's regional character. The method offers one workable route for developing Liaoning's ice-and-snow apparel C&C products and a practical channel for keeping local ICH alive in production.