The fashion industry is all about staying up to date with trending styles and consumer preferences while creating clothing, accessories, and footwear to match day-to-day trends. However, the way fashion is being produced and designed is now evolving in different ways than before.
Let’s face it, technology is everywhere we look these days. Technology has gradually been incorporated into our everyday lives for quite some time now without us even knowing. Now, technology has grown so large that advances have been made to enhance and benefit the fashion industry in various ways.
Design and production are key aspects to the creation of fashion and items we wear daily, and technology has developed tools to revolutionize these processes. Mechanisms including 3D printing, robotics, and even artificial intelligence have made their way into creating fashion and textiles. Technology has also made positive changes by prioritizing the creation of items with sustainable materials, reducing the environmental waste issues in our society.
Technology also impacts us as consumers and our experiences with fashion purchasing and the “customer experience.” New advances growing right now are virtual reality (VR), that involves customers getting to try on clothing and accessories virtually without having to physically go to a store. Augmented reality (AR) is another rising advancement where customers can see how a fashion item would look in the environment where they would like to wear the product too.
One more impact just as enticing as VR and AR is how e-commerce, also known as online shopping, has become the main outlet for consumer purchasing. E-commerce has only been evolving in vast selections on numerous websites and popularity in fashion. Nowadays, I guarantee the average individual would rather stay at home and shop on their technological device than go out to a store and shop because of the convenience and wide selection of products e-commerce provides.
At the end of the day, technology is a gradually growing force that has taken over our society. These mechanisms in the works for benefiting fashion will give designers and us consumers so many new benefits to take advantage of that, makes our lives easier overall. However, time will tell to see just how technology will impact the future of fashion, and if we’ll be wishing for life before technology or if we’ll take advantage of these new advances.
