Talks
Fashion Brands & Technology

How have fashion brands evolved with technology in the 21st Century?

read 4 min

Technology has lately been transforming at rapid paces, allowing several different industries and fashion brands to adapt and align with current changes.

Fashion Brands and technology

These technological transformations have initiated visible change within numerous brands. Furthermore, many brands and companies have implemented new technological innovations, such as generative and internal Al, e-commerce payment methods, as well as data analysis.

Fashion Brands and technology

One industry that is gradually adapting to these technological changes is the fashion industry. Especially as the fashion industry holds its reputation as one of the largest and most competitive industries, it becomes important that fashion brands are aligning well with current technological changes.

As new stylistic trends and norms are constantly being laid out, it ultimately becomes the responsibility of fashion brands to ensure that they are meeting their consumers’ fashionable demands and desires.

There are several fashion brands dedicated towards fully utilizing and implementing sustainable methods and techniques when designing their clothing.

With the rise of patterns of materialism and microtrends, there lies a certain sense of pressure within society to constantly wear and purchase what is currently trending. These stylistic norms, however, are almost always curated and chosen by the celebrities and social media influencers who society worships. Thus, fashion brands are left with the responsibility of having to keep up with these evolving trends.

Fashion Brands and Industry

Within the fashion industry, there are several fast fashion brands, like SHEIN and Temu that adopt a “manufacturer-to-consumer” model, indicating that the products that these brands sell go directly from manufacturers to the consumers, ultimately creating a more efficient supply-and-demand system for consumers.

fashion brands

Despite the sense of convenience and efficiency achieved from purchasing from fast-fashion brands, people fail to acknowledge the detrimental environmental effects that come from producing fast-fashion clothing.

Thus, as a means of becoming more sustainable and up to date with current transformations, many brands within the fashion industry have begun to incorporate new technological innovations within their production processes. These changes have become a lot more apparent within the practices and techniques of certain brands.

Exploring the Unsustainable Side of the Fashion Industry

With the competitive atmosphere surrounding the fashion industry, it becomes imperative that brands adopt new technological advancements, while simultaneously promoting a sense of sustainability and environmental consciousness in their brand image.

As many fast-fashion brands throughout the industry are utilizing a “manufacturer-to-consumer” model, consumers are essentially more reliant on these brands, especially since they release hundreds of new products every week and can ship them out at rapid paces.

fashion brands technology

As a result, customers choose to mass consume from these fast-fashion brands, as a means of prioritizing efficiency and price, rather than quality and sustainability.

Fast-fashion brands play a very compelling role within the fashion industry-consumers are swayed into purchasing and consuming from them, simply because of their cheaper prices and their large stock of trending products.

These fast-fashion brands need to ensure that they are utilizing the best business techniques and strategies that will appeal best to consumers and increase sales, to maintain their stance in competition.

There is a darker side to this sector of the fashion industry, especially as a lot of the ways in which fast-fashion clothing is manufactured and produced are done through detrimental and unsustainable measures. In addition, fast-fashion clothing is manufactured with synthetic fibers, like polyester and nylon—thus, when these pieces are discarded by consumers and end up in landfills, they ultimately leave negative and harmful effects on the environment.

People constantly overlook and fail to recognize the harmful environmental effects that come from the production process of fast-fashion clothing.

Society constantly thrives off current fashion trends; thus, when past fashion trends become less popular, people are consistently prompted to switch out their wardrobes, and unnecessarily replace their old clothing pieces for new ones. Fast-fashion companies essentially play into this game-they ensure that they are producing and releasing new clothing pieces that align considering current trends, as a means of appealing to more consumers.

Many fast-fashion workers are placed in dangerous working conditions with extremely low wages. Furthermore, around the world, solely 2% of fast-fashion garment workers are provided with livable wages, ultimately displaying the lack of care that these large corporations hold for their workers.

There are several ways in which a brand can begin to implement more sustainable methods, such as encouraging customers to donate and repurpose their clothing, as well as incorporating rental and resell services. While these are effective business models, there have lately been more brands executing new technological advancements into their production processes.

How are fashion brands becoming more sustainable through technological advancements?

As brands are gradually implementing new technologies, there are a few brands out there that are meshing both sustainability and technology together.

One brand that has surfaced their brand image around sustainability was Otrium.

Furthermore, the co-founders at Otrium,, Milan Daniels and Max Klijnstra, sought to fulfill their goal of minimizing the number of clothing pieces that didn’t sell, and emphasizing the idea that all clothing deserved to be worn.

Otrium is essentially an online outlet store and platform, allowing people to purchase leftover clothing from a wide variety of brands at discounted prices, as a means of ensuring that all clothing was being used and worn.

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Credits:
Rachel Yu
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Strut Your Growth: Scaling
Revenue for Fashion Brands
with Andrew Curtis, CEO, Clearco and Sazan Sela Director of Digital, Stoney Clover Lane

FEBRUARY 06TH, Thursday
10:00 AM TO 11:00 AM EST