The fashion of the future will be very different from the current one. The innovation spawned by new technologies and the new global digital customer has the ability to completely change the way fashion items are made, purchased and consumed. Rising trends and global forces shape customer behavior, as well as the function of brands and retail, in a more volatile way than ever before.

In order to understand this new phenomenon affecting the fashion sector, Global Fashion Agenda & The Boston Consulting Group have analyzed disruptive developments in other industries under the vision and contribution of industry leaders in terms of the organization of scenarios and digital irruption. Based on these findings, they offer three new business model scenarios for the sector and the fashion industry: fashion as a service, instant fashion and intelligent fashion.

Both institutions report that these new scenarios are not predictions, but a visionary and medium-term result on the fashion of the future. At the same time, they call for reflection on how organizations should be planned and prepared for tomorrow. The fashion industry has to be very focused on recognizing trends that challenge its business model in the preliminary phase and generating efficient responses that lead to continued and sustainable growth.

1. Fashion as a service

The idea of sharing comes to fashion to encourage and drive the much-publicized concept of reuse. Just as today’s consumers subscribe to software as a service (SaaS) instead of purchasing it directly, fashion customers rent their clothes. By drastically reducing the need (or obligation?) to manufacture we will drastically reduce the fashion industry’s environmental footprint. The neo-relocalization of fashion sourcing promotes fashion as a service to seduce new generations of conscious consumers, including the Z generation.

2. Instant fashion

Fashion customers order and receive the items they buy, when and how they want them, using new technologies such as 3D printing or others that meet the goal of on-demand production that can be implemented even in the store. The environmental footprint of a production model under this framework is reduced and the competition to meet consumer demand increases considerably. This means moving from the supply-driven model to the demand-driven model and to the ultra-personalization of fashion items.

3. Intelligent fashion.

Clothes will have the electronic ability to adapt and adjust instantly to the wearer’s needs. Intelligent fibers allow garments to alter their colors and through this feature the environmental impact is reduced by minimizing the

Reality and hope in fashion

Fashion faces a reality that is recognized and it has an enormous challenge to change it in order to reduce its social and environmental footprint. We all have well-founded hopes that brands and retail respond to the call for collaboration and that the development of these new guidelines will materialize once and for all in the reality of the sector. Only the joint effort of the players in the sector will ensure that many of these innovations and developments reach the necessary scale. Even in the best situation, this requires joint investments and efforts over many years. The need to generate value in order to change reality is as important as ever and more urgent than ever. Let us trust and be confident that the creativity and commitment of leading players have the capacity and ability to generate a thriving fashion industry that respects society and the environment.

It will be a pleasure to meet you again in this same blog with the analysis of the annual report Pulse of the Fashion Industry 2019. In the meantime, we are confident that fashion will continue to follow the path of sustainability and that its pace towards circular fashion will be increasingly steady and frenetic.

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