The Fashion Futurists' Toolkit – Coming Soon!
Edited By: Eunsuk Hur, Caroline Hemingray, Stephen Westland
Edition: 1st Edition
First Published: 2025
eBook Published 17 March 2025
Pub. Location: London
Imprint: Routledge
Pages: 270
eBook: ISBN9781003415589
I’m thrilled to announce that our latest book, Fashion Trends and Forecasting: The Fashion Futurists' Toolkit, will be released on March 17, 2025!
What’s it about?
Fashion Trends and Forecasting: The Fashion Futurists’ Toolkit explores how fashion students and industry professionals can research global megatrends, macro-trends, and micro-trends that influence consumers, businesses, and fashion product design. The book provides essential insights into the role of trend forecasting in the fashion industry and how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are shaping its future.
Covering both macro- and micro-trends, including fashion styles, textiles, and color trends, it also examines how AI, the metaverse, and other technological advancements are transforming fashion forecasting. Designed to help students and professionals navigate fast-changing consumer needs, the book offers practical guidance on identifying broader cultural, environmental, political, and technological shifts that impact the industry. Each chapter introduces specific forecasting methods, equipping readers with the tools to conduct effective research and trend analysis. It maps out a combination of 11 specialists’ views on their respective forecasting fields, including sustainability, technology, cultural anthropology, colours, textiles, fashion, marketing, management and fashion education.
Why I started this book project
I’ve always been fascinated by future studies and sustainability in the fashion and textile industries. This book is a reflection of that passion—bringing together innovative approaches to forecasting with a strong emphasis on sustainability, technological advancements, and industry evolution.
Fashion trend forecasting is a crucial element of every fashion business’s operations and enables designers, merchandisers, buyers, marketers and strategists to understand business practices, consumer lifestyles and fashion trends. Forecasting outcomes directly influence short- and long-term business directions and influence the fashion industry’s manufacturing cycle. However, the subject of fashion trend forecasting, and how to research, analyse and interpret trends, is often considered a specialist’s task and an experts’ domain. More often than not, fashion students passively adopt professional forecasters’ insights, without a sound grasp of the approaches behind them. The trend forecasting process and methodological approaches are often not well understood by the wider industry.
Furthermore, over the past few years, emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, big data and extended reality technologies have transformed the landscape of the production, consumption and communication of fashion. Several industry practitioners and futurists have anticipated that AI technology could completely transform how we live, work and interact with people. Advanced AI technologies enable fashion forecasters to see into consumer minds quickly and offer more sophisticated outputs for supporting new product development processes and strengthening the brand’s diverse decision-making processes. However, there is a limited understanding of the roles played by these new technologies in leveraging the trend forecasting process and the implications of their use for industry practices.
More importantly, there is also growing demand for companies to lift their environmental performance due to escalating public concern about climate change, depletion of natural resources and decreasing biodiversity. Traditional fashion forecasting approaches mostly focus on offering guidance on micro-trend analysis, such as colour, materials and style directions. There is a lack of supporting insight into long-term strategic business directions, particularly in relation to business sustainability. Moreover, it is important to critically reflect on how future fashion professionals will nurture their skills, knowledge and mindsets to address the fast-changing consumer demands, market environments and technological advancement in Industry 4.0 and the roles that fashion forecasting education will play in that evolution.
This book aims to offer essential forecasting methods, techniques and tools for future fashion trend forecasters, ranging from current undergraduates to postgraduate students as well as today’s professional forecasters, equipping them with the ability to better divine and respond to the industry’s future. Readers will learn the key concepts and theories in trend forecasting. They will also learn how to interpret nowcasting, forecasting and backcasting data to develop business strategies and new product development through evaluating forecast consumer demands, colours, textiles and fashion style trends.
Sustainability >
Creativity >
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