Tech Trendy, Fast Fruition
Forecasting has become a vital part of our everyday lives, it dictates the products we buy, the entertainment we consume, the weather we see outside our window on Saturday night such as heavy downpours of rain, and the clothes we put on our back, but the latter part of this operates much slower than the climate change we see coming, forecasting a trend we see on the runway at New York Fashion Week takes a total of 50 weeks to bring to life, thanks entirely to supply to linear methods, but the power of technology can increase how fast fashion trends reach our hands, in this edition of Informa & Fashion Snoops’s “Fashion Tech Series”, “New Age Of Design”.
In the live panel that took place on April 13, participants from budding tech firms who specialize in digital and technology software have seen for themselves how storing information in iClouds, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), and choosing from a range of design patterns and fabrics already on database can dramatically reduce the turnaround time of fashion trends from idea to on the consumer from 50 weeks to as fast as 4 weeks, plus the amount of waste accumulated by far from forecasting after item production is also reduced to very small amounts, leaving little to go to the landfill, and 100 percent sustainable fashion done beautifully in progress.
It’s not just about achieving zero percent carbon footprint or even reducing manpower to create that next great fashion trend in a significantly short amount of time, it’s also about enhancing creativity in fashion, allowing creative process to always be on-going, implementing modifications not only when sketching out the concept and idea, but modification to always take place, even as close as up to the moment of production done from nearby, and it can all be done just from one room, but from anywhere you are in the world, done easily right on your iPad.
Avatars
At the beginning of the “New Age Of Design” report, their first of five tech aspects begin with the “Avatars”, a digital form of limitless expression that creates a surreal experience for the one who wants to take that digital piece of fashion and bring it into reality, avatars can also be used to take measurements of your foot so it matches the size of the shoe you want to buy, but also be leery of abstraction blurring reality and emotions, plus a high level of fraud and impersonation exist.
XR Collaboration
The concept of fashion has its humble beginnings somewhere, it all starts right from the moodboard, brands and Fashion Designers getting an idea where their consumer is with their forms of expression, also relying on the one creating the fashion concept, virtual reality and augmented reality play a pivotal role in challenging Designers to rise from 2D to 3D and 4D technology which allow creative freedom to be sustainable and agile, and have a substantial advantage over their competitors.
Digital Twins
In any line of work that involves product development and sampling, lots of time and work are involved, that’s never been more true than it is in fashion, doing the process by hand is apparently an understatement, drafts and prototypes are a step and repeat in over 6 months alone, plus shipping and handling, these bottlenecks become a thing of the past with digital twins, a leader in Industry 4.0 and Web 3, a simulated manual sampling process along with textiles being done digitally uncover better ways to do things while choosing the right fabrics in record time, waste is reduced 70 percent, sampling process reduced 2 weeks or more, and digital garments can be presented to buyers, e-commerce, and marketing materials.
AI-Aided Design
AI opens the door to any possible situation or moment out there, fashion and AI are quickly becoming a marriage made in heaven, because you can take any sizing, color, sketch of how the garment or shoe is designed, or visualizing variations of how any given shoe or piece of apparel will look before it becomes a reality, seeing for yourself how it will look on a man or woman, there also proves to be a huge gray area with AI-Aided Design, such technology could have been created and copyrighted by someone else, so please make sure that the fashion variation you come up with was not done by someone else first, learn a very valuable lesson from Drake and The Weeknd, where their vocals were replaced by AI.
Smart Fashion
It’s just a watch, not it’s not, it’s just a pair of glasses, again, no, but it’s just a coat, not exactly, the Apple Watch apparently the best example proves it does more than tell time, that same smart technology can now be found in glasses that can do more than help you read, it takes phone calls, provides data, and audibly senses your mood, same goes for a coat or a shirt can sense your body’s movement and measurements, smart RFID and NFC chips are found in these fashions, proving that fashion and digital collaboration are no longer just a gimmick, but a need.
Gen Z… & The Fast 90’s
In case you haven’t noticed over the last 7 years, we’ve seen resurrections of 1990’s fashion found on teens and young adults of Generation Z who were born between 1997 and 2009, we saw it with grunge fashion back in 2016, then biker shorts with heavy sweat shirt in 2021, and now the return of flare leggings and flare trousers where at first were slow to come back, but suddenly overtaking traditional leggings, thanks to Olivia Rodrigo.
From what could be the very last phase of fashion trends done in a 50 week process, these last 2 years of the ladder 90’s trends Daniel Plus Lauren just mentioned moved through fashion pretty fast, it’s unlikely AI had something to do with it, could be more so from COVID-19 causing fashion to play catchup, but also keeping fashion on pause as we still find our way back from the pandemic, plus inflation.
Now as the first-ever AI season of fashion gets rolled out, how fast will the first set of AI produced fashion trends that will quickly erase the ills of Gen Z fashion stay before the next set of fashion trends come along?