The Interline will be closing its doors for the holidays from the 23rd of December. We ended our official run of content yesterday, with a roundup and analysis of 2024’s most popular features, and we will return in early January. Until then, the team here wishes our readers all the best for the holiday season.
In most of the ways that count, the forces that have defined this year in fashion technology have not been new. The splashiest headlines and the deepest analysis have both come from predictable subjects:
- A steady figuring-out of what AI actually means for fashion, with industry ingenuity, creative pushback, and technological progress all proceeding along the tracks the various authors of The Interline’s AI Report 2024 set out back in spring.
- A deeper reckoning with the realisation that consumers’ and regulators’ expectations around transparency, traceability, and accountability are only getting higher. It feels trite to say that “sustainability” remained a big deal in 2024, given the scale and the urgency of the action the industry needs to take, but there’s still no better umbrella term. And as we set out in The Interline’s Sustainability Report 2024, there are still no easy answers to calls for action that are as righteous as they are foreseeable.
- A mercurial economy and a massively unpredictable world. While the depth and divergence of the different commercial outlooks might have taken some sectors by surprise, the overall trajectory of the fashion and retail market – towards uncertainty being the prevailing mode, and agility being the foil for it – has been visible for a while.
- A rising bar for technology adoption, accompanied by a heavy weight being placed on the solutions themselves. Published just before the holiday season, Fashion & Technology in 2025 is a new forward-looking report from MMGNET and The Interline, and some of its key findings include a testament to just how far technology has become part of the fashion industry toolkit – the majority of professionals interact with industry-specific tools at least once a week – as well as evidence of how strongly fashion businesses of all shapes and sizes believe that technology will help solve the industry’s problems.
- A continued commitment to digital product creation. Even though innovation projects are often high on the list of expenditure to be cut during difficult times, DPC and 3D seem to be weathering the uncertainty – not least because these initiatives are, themselves, potentially tools for fighting against those pressures. There’s much more to dissect here, of course, which is why The Interline’s final deep-dive report of this year was The DPC Report 2024!
What else is coming in 2025 now feels a little harder to predict. While it’s certainly going to be true that each of these 2024 trends will persist into the new year – being felt more acutely in some market segments than others – it feels likely that, when The Interline team sits down to write our year-end 2025 message, we’ll be referencing something completely out-of-scope at this point in time.
One thing is certain, though: The Interline will be here throughout 2025, taking our signature technology-first lens to fashion, footwear, accessories – and perhaps even an additional market segment before the year is out…
For now, the extended team wishes our loyal readers and partners a restful holiday break. We’ll see everyone back here in January, when The Interline will be heading to NRF in New York City as the start of our event calendar for 2025.
