January – Phygital Fashion, Beyond the Hype
One of the first stories on our calendar this year was this article from The Digital Fashion Group that looked at the blurring of the lines between physical and digital (“phygital”) processes, as well as the role that phygital fashion could play in circularity and sustainability.
Those are some big ideas that were extremely current at the start of this year, but the definitions of phrases like “Web3” and “Metaverse” has morphed a lot in the last twelve months – with time not being especially kind to some of the bolder early proclamations and promises of purely digital fashion. The hysteria has slowed, the words themselves have become contentious, and fashion businesses seem to be focusing their digital strategies elsewhere.
However, there is still a strong case for phygital fashion – which is what this article focuses on – when the term is used to define a blending of physical and digital processes and assets, which are deployed in service of enabling fashion to shift from a mass production model to a made-to-order model. While the jury is very much still out on whether selling digital garments is any kind of foil to over-consumption of physical ones, it’s certainly true that designing garments digitally, selling them based on those digital assets, and only then producing the physical version would solve many of fashion’s deepest-seated problems.
February – New Strategies For an Unpredictable Fashion Industry
With 2023 well underway, we teamed up with Printful to survey the market and measure the scale, impact, and severity of overproduction.
While holiday sales for the end-of-2023 season actually emerged better than we predicted in many markets – especially the US – this does little to invalidate the core theme of this story: that fashion has an overproduction problem. Channels are still overstuffed, money is still tied up in product that is not moving, and the industry has, on balance, made only halting progress towards re-aligning supply with demand.
Reflecting on this story from February, our team all still agreed with the conclusion that intuition-based forecasting is no longer a viable strategy. More than ever, the industry needs scalable, flexible, and reliable alternatives, and as a result it’s been good to see that in-country, on-demand manufacturing is growing, even if the business model there requires some refinement.
March – Mind the Gap: Fashion’s Digital Talent Shortage
“In the fashion industry, specifically, there is a huge gap in digital skills, both inside organisations and in the labour market – the talent pool is more of a talent puddle,” wrote Safir Bellai in a popular piece discussing fashion’s digital talent gap, published in March 2023.
Since the pandemic, fashion has seen the benefits of widespread DPC adoption at the capability level: reduced reliance on physical samples, better decision-making possibilities, quicker time-to-market, enhanced agility, and the potential for innovative business models and consumer experiences. But as brands continue to expand their DPC initiatives, season by season, the scarcity of skilled talent poses a growing risk to operations.
Reading this article again nine months later, we feel that the sentiment remains as true as ever. The Interline’s recently released DPC Report 2023 – for which Saifr also wrote – demonstrates that the 3D / DPC market is on an upward trajectory, but what will be needed to secure its success is the cultivation of both traditional and digital fashion skills, side by side.
Today, we still firmly endorse the view that the approach from educators and brands should be to work together – blending the academic and the practical – to produce a new generation of fashion professionals who are rooted in tradition but who have two feet planted firmly in the present and future of fashion.
April – The New, Sustainable Normal for Brands and Retailers
Into the second quarter of the year, April’s most widely-read piece of content was about moving the burden of sustainability from consumers to brands, retailers, and suppliers. We analysed how the last decade has created more awareness – for brands, retailers, suppliers, and consumers – around the severe impact that producing and buying clothing has on the planet. Even so, the market for sustainable fashion is still relatively small, and is not expanding at the necessary pace given the ongoing destruction of the environment through fashion’s existing practices. We proposed that fashion needs more radical, pre-consumer interventions to meet its targets. This would place the onus on producers, brands, and other stakeholders in the fashion value chain to advance the speed of consumer adoption for sustainable categories, or find ways of getting around it.
Now at the end of 2023, we as a team reflected on the legislation for fashion and textiles that has been put forward by the European Commision and concluded that there is a stronger shift away from the burden falling on the consumer, and the emphasis now is placed firmly on brands and retailers to be the agents of change – as well as making them responsible for compliance and disclosure.
May – Fashion Meets Architecture, Accuracy, and Authenticity
The most read post in the month of May was from Katy Schildmeyer, who shared her thoughts on the power of 3D, and reflected on how fashion has a lot to learn from other industries – especially architecture – that have made the transition from flat sketching to 3D CAD. Katy also drew our attention to the fact that fashion’s use of 3D still has significant distance to travel when it comes to objectivity and accuracy. If there is to be a reduction in waste, improvement in efficiency, and an alignment of different disciplines, a 3D asset must be closely linked to accurate manufacturing specifications.
“A significant portion of returns, approximately 38%, stem from customers struggling to imagine the item on different body sizes and skin tones.” We found this quote to capture the essence of the message to be drawn – clothing must be designed with core sizes instead of aesthetic ideals – something fundamental in architecture, and something that’s often overlooked in fashion, where sizing is routinely criticised for being inconsistent.
This is one of the areas where digital product creation has the biggest potential return, helping to empower consumers to visualise how a garment should look on them, reducing frustration and unrealistic expectations. The result, in an ideal world where virtual try-on achieves widespread adoption, will be fewer returns, better customer loyalty, and a less damaging effect on the environment (both when creating samples and when it comes to returns.)
June – Ongoing Opacity in the Supply Chain
The start of summer in the northern hemisphere kicked off with our analysis of the controversy involving six influencers who were invited to tour some of fast-fashion e-retailer Shein’s first-tier facilities as part of a “Shein 101” PR campaign. Backlash followed when the group was accused of “promoting propaganda” in exchange for travel, products, and exposure.
The influencers were shown what appeared to be an extremely selective view of the company’s Tier 1 cut-make-sew and warehousing network, and our analysis at the time was that this relatively narrow understanding of the multi-tiered fashion value chain was likely to become a bigger problem in the near future, with brands attempting to capitalise on consumers’ inexperience to create a “sheen” of respectability.
Now at the end of the year, this practice is soon to be stopped in its tracks thanks to ‘greenwashing’ legislation, but the foundation to build greater disclosure on top of is hardly promising: Fashion Revolution’s 2023 Transparency Index found that just 12% of brands publish a responsible purchasing code of conduct, and progress between 2022 and 2023 has been minor.
July – Circular Initiatives’ Need for Speed
This month’s most popular post was a theme that is well-explored at The Interline: the promises made by the fashion industry and the aims of the legislature, compared with the practicalities and the actions actually taken. We analysed the results of the Special report 17/2023: Circular economy – Slow transition by member states despite EU action, that was released by the European Court of Auditors, who found that the €10 billion that EU member states received to stimulate the circular economy has not been used effectively. In short, the large sum of money that was set aside to help industries generate less waste and give their products longer lifespans was instead used to orchestrate and optimise the disposal of waste, with little indication that overall waste production was reduced as a consequence of this investment.
We as a team still believe that for fashion to move beyond the pilot stage in circularity initiatives, the industry needs to explore the policies and practices of leading regions in circular fashion, such as the Netherlands, to understand how early adoption of sustainable practices, supportive governments, excellent infrastructure, world-class design, and thriving startup and fashion non-profit scenes can drive circular innovation.
In the intervening months, things on this front have moved along in the right direction for many nations in the EU and abroad but slowly. For instance, even though EU Parliament and Council negotiators recently agreed on an update to the “ecodesign” regulation, they will still need to formally approve the agreement before it can come into force.
August – DPC’s Darlings: Digital Twins
This month, Mark Harrop started the conversation around digital twins in a piece for us that detailed their value in a market where speed, efficiency, creativity, price, and quality are essential to success. While the vision of a full digital twin (i.e. a complete digital replica of a physical product, material, or process that can stand in for every conceivable use case) is still a vision rather than a reality, the idea of untethering key lifecycle stages from physical prototypes and samples, and enabling better decision-making, greater accountability, improved speed to market and much more, is as strong as eve.
As you might expect, given that this philosophy is one of the cornerstones of the DPC Report we released just last week, our team still believes that fashion is just scratching the surface on the power of digital twins – and this goes for downstream aspects like e-commerce and consumer interactions but also, upstream workflows that involve mills and manufacturers. One addition we would make to this piece today would be to underline that the complete vision for a digital twin will only be potentially realised when the DPC ecosystem matures to a point where digital twins can be supported in an end-to-end digital process without compromising on accuracy and can be passed back and forth between different teams at different stages of fashion’s value chain with trust and confidence.
September – The Vision for Valuable 3D Assets
In this insightful piece that first appeared as part of our PLM Report, Mark Charlton wrote about what he believes is possible for DPC in apparel and footwear that goes beyond just a visual output, and extends into the possibility space of digital twins that his counterpart, Mark Harrop, wrote about the month prior.
The idea of the piece was to create inspiration around how embedding data (like accurate 2D patterns, sizing information, and graded patterns) within 3D assets can streamline the apparel product creation process. Mark also mentions how accurate costing and manufacturing instructions can be unlocked by treating the 3D asset as the product definition and by progressing to a stage of fully manufacturable digital twins, the “creator” and “manufacturer” will be brought closer together.
The Interline team shares the opinion that this remains as relevant as ever, and that the value of a 3D picture has the potential to be worth at least a billion words in the current state that the fashion industry is in. The chasm between brands and retailers and their suppliers remains wide, and even though progress has been made, it remains wise for those going forward on their DPC journey with a renewed emphasis on the presence of precise information about the 3D asset, that is easily interpreted and implementable. For a digital asset to serve as a common language, and as a way to shorten the distance between different stakeholders, this should be a driving principle.
October – Creating Fashion’s Connected Future
There was a lot of interest in our interview and extrapolations of the data from Kalypso’s 2023 Digital Product Creation In Retail Research. In October, we sat down with Sophia Lara, Digital Product Creation and Transformation Lead at Kalypso, to capture the most important takeaways from the survey dataset, and to share our opinion on how these fit into wider industry context.
The survey revealed that while most product leaders in retail, footwear, and apparel are engaged in a 3D/DPC strategy, there is a noticeable disconnect between the number of organisations that have embarked on DPC initiatives and the number that have successfully connected the digital thread between all their different capabilities.
At The Interline, we have no doubt that the DPC landscape will continue to grow – something that’s examined in considerable depth in our just-published DPC Report 2023. Perhaps at a pace that is different to the past three years, but there is set to be more adoption and thus development for all along the value chain when it comes to DPC. Interoperability continues to be something that brands, retailers, and suppliers must collectively work towards, but as DPC continues to mature, our team believes the issue will be resolved and will move fashion ever closer to a seamless, digital-native workflow.
November – Power to the People and the Planet
This month’s most read article by Megan Doyle was originally published in The Interline’s first Sustainability Report, and centres around one of the most important parts in the fashion industry: people. Unfortunately, as Megan wrote at the time, the industry tends to prioritise environmental metrics over the welfare of garment workers in its sustainability strategies, which has resulted in minimal progress in worker rights and fair compensation. Megan explains that while new legislation is expected to have both immediate and lasting effects, a combination of consumer activism and established frameworks, case studies, and standards should serve as influential factors in persuading fashion brands and consumers to equally prioritise both people and the planet.
Our team all agree that this issue is one that should be at the top of the agenda to address, but is unlikely to be resolved soon – given the opaque nature of how brands operate. But it is necessary to keep talking about it, something that activist collective Yes Men is making sure of. The group executed their second prank of the year on Adidas to highlight concerns about the rights of garment workers in the company’s supply chain. During the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, activists posed as Adidas representatives and falsely announced plans to compensate workers with virtual currency for purchasing goods in a virtual ‘AdiVerse’ that they couldn’t access in the real world.
This incident follows a previous hoax during Berlin Fashion Week, where a false statement suggested the footwear giant’s senior leadership would appoint a former garment worker as co-CEO. Although Adidas was the target here, they are one of numerous brands who have been called upon to treat their supply chain workers better. And while we seldom level criticism directly at individual brands, on balance the relative inaction taken to elevate garment workers to the same level of priority as it places on carbon emissions, waster, and pollution is something that our team agrees is absolutely necessary for genuine sustainability to be realised.
December – DPC Domination
It’s a DPC-themed December, as our DPC Report 2023 was our most popular piece of content by a wide margin. We had our work cut out for us on this year’s report as our 2022 DPC Report surpassed our expectations significantly. It was read by thousands of leaders and decision-makers in DPC and resonated with folks across the board in fashion. Our 2023 Report is another comprehensive exploration of the DPC ecosystem and its systems, strategic frameworks, the interplay between its upstream and the downstream applications, and the tools that bring it all together.
Standing back now at the end of the year, two in-depth DPC reports in our rearview, we can safely say that the fashion industry is headed in the right direction, heading towards a future where we can increasingly rely on digital twins of physical products – be that internally, between brands, retailers, and suppliers, or in consumer-facing applications.
After another banner year for fashion technology, our team looks forward to witnessing a continued trend of transformative ideas translating into tangible actions in 2024, with focus on the fashion industry’s people, the planet, as well as on creativity and innovation.
