2025: The Fashion Technology Rearview
An annual tradition: our team recaps and comments on the stories that defined each month of this year in fashion technology.
AI Shopping Is Done By Brute Force Today, But A Codified Standard Could Change Things In 2026
Holiday shopping numbers show AI playing an assistive role, but the coming year could see some sweeping changes in the readiness of eCommerce platforms for agentic use.
Building A Spatial Brain To Serve Up Digital Twins For The Agentic Web
To differentiate themselves, brands are seeking to put interactive 3D content and experiences in front of consumers at scale. This is placing a new emphasis on accelerating the AI-native toolchain for creating, distributing, automating, and monetising the digital twins at the heart of the next era of engagement.
Digital Product Creation Report 2026 – available now
Exclusive brand stories, cutting-edge process and pipeline profiles, top-flight executive interviews, and frank analysis of the AI-touched future of 3D and digital product creation for fashion and beauty.
In A World Of Vibe-Coding, The Real Vibes That Matter For Consumer-Facing Technology Are Still Cultural
Threading the needle on sloppy AI Christmas ads, metaverse funding cuts, and how perennial digital platforms like Fortnite are holding onto their relevance in fashion and beauty.
Podcast: Forecasting Fashion’s Future Between Now And 2030
With new Euromonitor data and insights to work from, we start to close the year by looking forward at what the next four have in store at a global market and technological level, and how fashion brands are likely to respond.
Thirteen Years On, The Future Of Wearables Still Looks Suspiciously Like Glasses
Google’s 2026 plan for fashion-forward smart glasses is intended to break open a category dominated by Meta, taking us back to the original Google Glass concept from 2012 - just with an injection of AI.
Podcast: Bringing Fashion Week Back To Manchester
How the complicated industrial legacy and unique culture of The Interline’s home city, combined with a new emphasis on technology, made 2025 the right year to resurrect its fashion week.
Beauty Leads Europe’s Innovation Race – Technology Could Be Next
Europe’s beauty sector now ranks among its most advanced industries, where data and modelling guide everything from formulation to production. The stage is set for the next steps in beauty technology.
A Global Manufacturing Slowdown Versus The Resilience Of The World’s Factory
Manufacturing data across major economies shows universally softening demand, but thanks in part to policy and trade decisions that over-emphasised the importance of US exports, China’s trade surplus has nevertheless passed the $1 trillion threshold for the first time.
Homegrown Retail Tech Comes Under Two Kinds Of Scrutiny
Internally-developed brand / retail technology has become sophisticated enough to be treated with the same scrutiny as open-market systems, as the recent Alpha Modus and Temu cases show. What’s next?
Help Map the State of Product Testing in 2025/26
As we navigate a historically unpredictable holiday shopping season, there has never been a stronger mandate to build an advance understanding of how products will perform. Join a survey to share your perspective on the present and the future of product testing.
Is Fashion’s AI Infrastructure Ready For The Holidays?
Seamless frontend experiences hinge on a great deal of back-end complexity across the eCommerce tech estate. Add AI to the mix, and apply seasonal pressure, and the cracks in fashion and beauty’s infrastructure could start to show this year.
Podcast: Making Sense Of The AI Shopping Journey
Consumers are surrounded by chatboxes, all promising proactive, personalised advice on what to buy, and where. But it’s unclear how general purpose AI models really “shop,” how they gather data about products, and how much they really understand user intent. I talk to Maria Belousova, CTO at Daydream, about the technical and cultural components of teaching AI the vocabulary of fashion.