Fashion forecasting focuses on upcoming trends. A fashion forecaster predicts the colors, fabrics, textures, materials, prints, graphics, beauty/grooming, accessories, footwear, street style, and other styles that will be presented on the runway and in the stores for the upcoming seasons. The concept applies to not one, but all levels of the fashion industry including haute couture, ready-to-wear, mass market, and street wear. Fashion trend forecasting is an overall process that focuses on other industries such as automobiles, medicine, food and beverages, literature, and home furnishings. Fashion forecasters are responsible for attracting consumers and helping retail businesses and designers sell their brands. Today, fashion industry workers rely on the Internet to retrieve information on new looks, colors, celebrity wardrobes, and designer collections.
The fashion forecasting process includes the basic steps of understanding the vision of the business and profile of target customers, collecting information about available merchandise, preparing information, determining trends, and choosing merchandise appropriate for the company and target customer. Color and style are two of the important objects to forecast for most buyers and merchandisers.
The classical way for fashion brands and agencies to forecast trends is by analyzing runway shows, trade shows, newspapers & magazines’ information, and market research In the past, these sources were the only ones available to fashion forecasters and brands and retailers would use this information to plan their future collections. But the fashion industry has changed, and descriptive analytics is now accompanied by prescriptive and predictive analytics. The Internet, and consequently, social media, has accelerated the life cycle of trends and birthed phenomena like fast fashion and global supply chains.
Trend virality, time-to-market speed, and consumer behavior has shifted in the last decade as a result of the digital age. There are now fashion forecasting services using new technologies and mostly AI, to predict what’s coming next Artificial intelligence in fashion forecasting is often used to analyze text and hashtags on social media, online collections published by brands and magazines, and consumer behavior on e-commerce. On social media, machine learning is another way that AI is used to forecast fashion trends. This is the algorithmic process of analyzing a large database of images to determine the many different features of clothing and accessories. This raw data can then be translated into trend forecasts with human intervention, from determining a trend’s online visibility to its future market demand. Artificial intelligence has many applications in fashion forecasting that touch product assortment, customer behavior, design processes, marketing, and more. The growing importance of social media and customer perception has quickened the adoption pace of AI in fashion forecasting.