Getting a tailor to custom-make your entire wardrobe is wayyy outside of the financial capabilities of almost everyone except the very very wealthy today. In th

Getting a tailor to custom-make your entire wardrobe is wayyy outside of the financial capabilities of almost everyone except the very very wealthy today. In the 40s one might as well have said that handheld calculators will never work - we can always have the women ("calculators") down the hall crunch the numbers for us! Having a machine that, given the correct fabric, can print an arbitrary design would enable clothing stores to completely eliminate most of their factories, warehouses, delivery costs, standing inventory (much of which is thrown out or sold for a pittance), employees, and a significant percentage of the size of their stores. They will be able to react to fast-changing fashion trends instantly with exellent efficiency. They will be able to keep and reuse old designs more or less indefinitely. Sure, machines will be printing a lot of the same thing over and over again at any given time - but the thing they're printing over and over again will be what's popular and selling right there and right now, which is very difficult to predict months in advance and for every location. That, combined with the huge reduction in overhead, will allow the first mass-market retail store to figure out on-demand printing a huge advantage over its competitors. Not to mention that it will fit the customer as close to perfectly as measurement and design allow, so the product itself will probably be of significantly higher utility than what you can get in the average mall store today.