The Fashion Technology Agenda 2024

With the festive season behind us, and a new year underway, the agenda for 2024 is starting to take shape. As we saw in our 2023 rearview, prediction can be a tricky business; things that dominated the fashion technology conversation this time last year wound up fizzling out, while forces that didn’t garner anywhere near as many headlines had a far more pronounced impact on the way the industry developed.

Stepping into 2024, unpredictability is still everywhere at the market and geopolitical level. It’s difficult – maybe impossible – to predict the movements of the raw material trade, the machinations of the actors behind ongoing conflicts and human-made crises, or the next set of manifestations of climate change. And in this sense, not much has changed since early 2023.

What’s different now, though, is that fashion – and the world at large – has shaken off some of the loosely-defined technology long-shots that loomed so large over the start of 2023. Words and acronyms like “metaverse,” “NFTs,” and “Web3” are still current – and still very contentious – but they no longer feel like anchors on the future, and they instead feel the way they probably should have from the beginning: like possibilities on a much wider horizon.

In their place, fashion is facing a new year that’s highly likely to be governed by three primary forces: AI, sustainability, and digital product creation (DPC). So these are the three areas that The Interline team have chosen to focus our deep-dive reports on for the 2024 calendar year.

The AI Report 2024 (our first in this space) will come first, in the spring. There is a huge amount to say about artificial intelligence right now, both in terms of challenging hype and validating potential. And although there’s a very real risk that the generative AI boom will be remembered as much for the ambulance-chasing hucksters as it is for the real use cases, when one of the world’s largest technology companies mandates that every PC keyboard shipping in the future must include a dedicated “AI key,” it’s safe to say that AI is more than a passing fad. We’ve previously written about the early stage potential (and the copyright quagmire) of generative AI for design assistance, but there’s a lot still to unpack in this specific space – commercially, ethically, creativity – as well as much, much more to consider beyond those narrow confines. We know that our readers now want to see the aspirational side of AI efforts crystallise into tangible action and return on investment this year – a predicted value of up to US $14.1 billion according to The State of Fashion 2024 Report – but we also believe it’s essential to take a critical eye on how that value is being realised, at what expense, and what the rush towards AI might herald for the future.

In summer, we’ll then turn our attention to sustainability with The Sustainability Report 2024 – our second deep focus on the evolving landscape of climate change, legislation, lifecycle impact assessment, and the battle between first and third-party data. 

As a snapshot of just some of the regulations that are set to come into force in 2024: just before the end of last year, the European Union approved new eco-design legislation (which the European Parliament is expected to formally adopt soon) that will include a ban on the destruction of unsold textiles and footwear products, alongside requirements designed to improve the circularity of products. Another formidable piece of legislation whose reporting period began from the 1st of January this year, is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The Directive aims to introduce a standardised system for companies meeting the thresholds to be evaluated and compared when it comes to sustainability. 

These requirements – and others like them – will have profound implications for businesses in fashion this year, influencing day-to-day operations as well as overarching strategic planning, and they also represent just a small part of a wider picture of shifting sourcing bases, changing livelihoods, and an all-round re-evaluation of the core business of making clothing.

In winter, we’ll be carrying forward the digital product creation conversation and community that The Interline has worked to capture in our previous two DPC Reports (in 2022 and 2023). Even though our 2023 edition was only released a few weeks ago, our team are already working on plans to take this unique annual publication to the next level, so stay tuned for announcements as we take a whole-year runway approach to documenting the next stage in perhaps fashion technology’s biggest journey with The DPC Report 2024.

If you’re a technology company, brand, retailer, supplier or writer, and you’d like to be featured in one of our 2024 reports please contact us. While we’ll be doing something completely new with The DPC Report 2024 for designers, we’re open to submissions and ideas for all three reports from today.