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The project of using 3D technology with fashion show

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The project of using 3D technology with fashion show

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The Fabric of Reality - An Immersive VR Fashion Show | Fashion Innovation Agency

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The Fabric of Reality, a fully immersive fashion show, was launched within the virtual Museum of Other Realities (MOR) in collaboration with RYOT, Verizon Media's storytelling production house, and Kaleidoscope. The experience was the first of its kind; a virtual reality fashion exhibition aimed at taking audiences on a journey to explore the story and narrative behind the designers' collection.

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Understanding Fashion's New Digital Frontier 

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Understanding Fashion's New Digital Frontier 

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The Interline’s partner in this piece, z-emotion, from the brands that use its suite of 3D solutions, indicate that consumers who see a 3D asset rather than a flat image of a product are 44% more likely to add it to their cart, and are nearly 30% more likely to purchase it.  This figure rises to a 65% increase in conversion when the shopper can visualise and interact with a product in AR.

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Fashion has come a long way with 3D. The instant impact of the pandemic brought digital product creation to the front of investment strategies in a hurry, but even pre-COVID brands and their suppliers had already taken some big strides. Physical samples were routinely being replaced with 3D assets for the purposes of prototyping and fit simulation. Designers were being empowered to change materials, components, and trims on the fly, and to see instantaneous results. Merchandising and retail teams were planning assortments in virtual spaces, and eCommerce catalogues were increasingly being populated with renders that could be indistinguishable from genuine product photography.

But as far as each of these individual areas has come, fashion has yet to reckon with the implications of becoming a digital industry - not just a physical industry with digital back-end processes, but a sector that outputs digital goods. And as much value as the industry has been able to obtain from the use of 3D in design, pattern development, supplier collaboration and virtual photography, these discrete applications of 3D could be approaching the point of diminishing returns - especially when we compare them to the gigantic possibility space that truly digital fashion offers.

To look at it another way, 3D initiatives have so far been focused on delivering physical fashion faster - streamlining in-house and supply chain processes - and more sustainably. The next step is to also apply the same simulation engines, the same tools, processes, and workflows to a different output - one that's wholly or partly digital.
Why digital fashion developed so quickly.
The concept of digital fashion can conjure up scepticism. As proven as the market for videogame cosmetic items is - a conservative, pre-pandemic estimate has it pegged at $50 billion by next year - brands might see selling digital versions of their clothes, to be worn by player avatars or, in augmented reality applications, by the buyer themselves, to be a distraction from their core business and the way they currently make money.

Similarly, the success of virtual makeup (a more literal sort of digital cosmetic) during periods of enforced remote working could easily be pigeonholed as a timely marketing exercise and nothing more.

Anyone who shares either concern could easily ask whether digital fashion, and the much-vaunted Metaverse, is a passing obsession destined to end now that physical products are starting to flow again, or an attempt by fashion to clutch at straws as COVID threatened the industry's survival.

It's important to understand that nobody expects the fashion industry to stop making physical garments. Although the past eighteen months have obviously seen dramatic disruptions to how and where shoppers make their purchases - with six years' worth of eCommerce growth crammed into 2020 alone - every demographic is still buying clothes. And while younger shoppers are leaning into sustainability in a serious way, evidence from this spring and summer suggests that even Generation Z consumers find it hard to resist the allure of low-cost fashions, because they no longer remember a world without " plentiful, cheaply produced clothes ".

This matters because, as of last year, Gen Z shoppers make up close to half of the global consumer base, with around $150 billion in spending power. These are, to put it bluntly, the consumers of today, not a target market for an indeterminate point in the future. And they are accustomed to variety, volume, and high-velocity gratification - even when, on the face of it, those things go against their principles.

Unsurprisingly, these are also the shoppers who are driving the downstream digitisation of fashion commerce. A significant portion of the overall eCommerce market in the United States now originates from a mobile device, and close to a third of younger consumers want online shopping to incorporate more augmented and virtual reality experiential elements.

Brands who respond to these trends are seeing results: statistics gathered by The Interline 's partner in this piece, , from the brands that use its suite of 3D solutions, indicate that consumers who see a 3D asset rather than a flat image of a product are 44% more likely to add it to their cart, and are nearly 30% more likely to purchase it. This figure rises to a 65% increase in conversion when the shopper can visualise and interact with a product in AR.

The world's analysts are also taking note: a detailed report written by PWC in 2019 suggests that VR and AR applications (which rely on 3D assets) could add $1.5 trillion to the global economy before the decade is over. And the simple act of having products to sell and experiences to partake in online determined a very different fortune for digital-native retailers at a time when their counterparts who were tied to shuttered physical stores were struggling to tread water.

As with many pre-pandemic predictions, the unforeseen, sudden shift to digital channels and experiences caused by COVID is likely to have made even these bold estimates seem conservative. Digitisation is happening faster and more comprehensively than ever, and as the pandemic begins to fade into the background, one of the most critical challenges facing any industry (fashion included) will be maintaining that momentum.

Here is where the real opportunity of fashion having a truly digital output opens up. The pandemic demonstrated the power of having digital channels to sell physical garments, but what if brands could cater to Generation Z's desire for newness and self expression through new all-digital channels with exclusively digital products?

This is the core principle behind digital fashion, which we can define simply as the sale (or free distribution) of digital garments intended to be worn in digital settings. Those settings might be augmented versions of real life, using real-time body projection mapping to allow a user to "wear" a garment in an Instagram or Snapchat story, or in a future AR application. They might be more stylised scenarios, where garments are intended to be worn by avatars and player characters in interactive experiences and videogames.

Both use cases have their roots in the same place: the design and development of garments in digital formats, using digital tools. And this is an area where, as we've established, fashion has already made real progress, prototyping, simulating, refining, and even selling products before they become physical. The key difference with digital fashion is that those products are never intended to become physical (or at least not exclusively), and this seemingly-simple distinction opens up a world of possibilities as well as the pressing question of whether fashion's existing 3D solutions are ready to deliver digital end products - which is something we'll circle back to shortly.

Crucially, right here, right now, the fashion industry is already forging ahead to meet consumers at the new digital frontier. One-off digital garments to be worn in AR are a reality, and the fashion industry has just seen an incredibly high profile collaboration between one of the world's most recognisable luxury brands, and the cross-media platform Fornite, which has long since transcended its roots in gaming. Today, consumers can already buy digital versions of luxury goods, designed to fit in-universe characters, and, for those shoppers who can access them, physical counterparts of those garments as well.

In the shadow of the headlines that collaboration has created, even brands who might once have dismissed digital fashion are taking notice again. More importantly, brands who already create in 3D, conduct line reviews in 3D, send 3D files to their suppliers, and promote new products to shoppers in 3D, are asking themselves how they take their styles from those discrete use cases and bring them to one of the biggest interactive worlds there is, and the splashiest advertising spaces the world's capitals have to offer.

Same inputs; different output.
What those brands - and the industry as a whole - need is a way to create a new output from the same set of inputs. So for digital fashion to truly make sense as a revenue stream, brands will need to be able to rely on the 3D tools and talent they have already built to streamline the creation of physical garments, rather than being required to build new processes from scratch.

This is a problem that The Interline our partner, , believe can be tackled in two stages - part-digital and all-digital - which can each extend the value of pre-existing solutions, integrations, and in-house expertise at the same time as capitalising on the chance to create entirely new experiences for consumers.

What is a part-digital experience? A way of extending the power of 3D simulation and digital assets to the end user in an interactive way. Unlike virtual photography, where the brand is working with 3D assets and a 3D scene but delivering a static end result, a part-digital experience would allow the customer to make active use of the digital garment prior to purchasing its physical counterpart.

A strong example of a part-digital experience would be z-emotion's z.one virtual fitting engine, which was recently deployed by South Korean brand Covernat to achieve a 300% uplift in conversation rates, a 12X increase in product exposure, and a significant decrease in return rates. Unlike a traditional eCommerce application of 3D, where the consumer would be limited to rotating a pre-rendered .OBJ file alongside a set of fit guidelines, z-emotion's approach allows the customer to adjust various data points to set their height, weight, body type and key measurements, and then visualises garment tension and pressure in a way that the shopper can clearly understand.

This is, in essence, a dynamic experience that replaces a static one and engages the consumer in a digital native way. Crucially, it also permits the shopper to make adjustments on the fly, swapping colourways and adjusting their avatar in real-time, and seeing how those changes will be reflected in the end result. This is a level of interactivity and insight that was previously reserved for behind-the-scenes brand users of 3D, now extended to give the shopper the utmost confidence in their buying decisions.

Crucially, for the brand, this confidence can be enabled without the need to create any new asset - instead enabling a new audience to interact with existing assets in a novel way by extending the technology ecosystem.

The same principles also underpin all-digital applications. Just as a shopper can create and drape an avatar for the purposes of simulating and testing the fit of a physical product, a consumer can clothe a more detailed (or more stylised) avatar in a garment that will be sold in digital-only form. And in both cases the garment can - with the support of the right technology ecosystem - be seamlessly ported from the design tool it was created in to the digital representation of the customer who's buying it.

This is a workflow that z-emotion is now preparing to showcase with one of the largest virtual social spaces and Metaverses in the Asian market. In the near future, designers will be able to create styles in z-emotion's widely-used Z-Weave design and patternmaking tool, and then to export these styles directly for hyper-stylised personal avatars - neatly capturing the power of generating new outputs without changing the input. Those styles will then be able to be freely distributed as part of a promotional strategy, or sold for a fraction of the cost of the physical garment, for users to wear in the virtual world.

But this upcoming partnership is by no means the only Metaverse out there, which is why z-emotion has also built similar export paths for the Unreal Engine, and for the most popular computer modelling application, Maya. This additional flexibility is geared towards allowing brands the ability to target consumers in nearly any real-time application, and with the digital fashion market predicted to grow more than 11% per year to nearly 5 billion users by 2025, there are going to be a lot of different Metaverse applications to reach them in - across various different global markets.
Moving fashion forward.
The Interline now firmly believes that the initial phase of fashion's adoption of 3D is finished, at least insofar as its shape and scope is well-defined, with established best practices, clear value propositions, mature technology, and the ability for new brands and retailers to follow in the pioneers' footsteps.

Now, as the idea of a Metaverse crystallises more rapidly than even the boldest predictions, the next phase is already upon us. Beyond using digital assets as aids for physical product design, development, and marketing, fashion has the opportunity to make use of those same assets in everything from part-digital consumer experiences to promotion and revenue generation from virtual worlds.

But this is not a transition that fashion should take lightly. Whether a brand is looking to create photoreal digital garments for use in augmented reality, or stylised versions of existing products for integration into a videogame franchise or virtual world, it will find itself up against the best that other, longer-established digital industries have to offer.

As the industry prepares for this transition, becoming a digital industry in earnest, there is a clear requirement for workflows and pipelines that can support brand and retail businesses in their digital ambitions. Until recently, those workflows have been exclusively homegrown. Despite the industry's progress with 3D in individual areas, there has been no clear pathway from initial digital design to final digital output.

This pathway is precisely what z-emotion set out to create, with seamless integrations between its 3D design and pattern simulation tools, its consumer-facing virtual fit engine, and the most common real-time engines used in digital marketing, interactive experiences, videogames, and more. After identifying a real concern among brands that the work they had put into implementing and scaling 3D might not translate into the ability to capitalise on the new digital frontier, z-emotion zeroed in on continuity - aiming to give fashion the ability to tweak 2D patterns and adjust fit in a 3D simulation, and then to take the same assets and push them to a wide range of digital use cases without rework or interpretation.

This vision for a more seamless digital future was compelling enough to attract investment in z-emotion from LG Electronics and other major names - all of whom share the belief, as The Interline does, that the more effectively fashion can become a digital industry, the more futureproof and profitable it can become.

And for brands and retailers that have seen more disruption in the past two years than at any almost any point prior, the possibility of creating digital outputs - and being able to target all the opportunities they bring - without reinventing the creative and technical inputs they have already spent years digitising will feel like a fast-track to the new digital frontier.

About our partner: z-emotion provides innovative 3D based digital solutions to help the fashion industry forward its digital transformation process. Based in South Korea with offices in Seoul and Hong Kong, z-emotion is a team with global talents over Asia, US and Europe. Over multiple rounds of product success, renowned strategic investors LG Electronics, Naver, VIVEX HTC and Shima Seiki also joined the exciting investment journey.

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A Different 3D Output: Understanding Fashion's New Digital Frontier - The Interline

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Fashion has come a long way with 3D. The instant impact of the pandemic brought digital product creation to the front of investment strategies in a hurry, but even pre-COVID brands and their suppliers had already taken some big strides. Physical samples were routinely being replaced with 3D assets for the purposes of prototyping and fit simulation.

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Imagine a world where your clothes are made of pixels rather than textiles.

One in three women considers a piece of clothing "old" after one or two wears¹.

Fast fashion is popularizing the idea that great style is synonymous with new outfits. Social media reinforces this mentality, with one in six young people claiming they won't rewear an outfit if it's been seen online².

Enter digital fashion.

Thanks to emerging technologies, you could have all the latest and greatest fashion trends in your closet.

Your virtual closet, that is.

Digital clothes, made from pixels instead of textiles, are gaining popularity³.

In real life, you could have a minimalist capsule wardrobe. Meanwhile, on social media, your digital self could be expressive with hundreds of new clothing items.

In short, you get the best of both worlds.

On its surface, digital fashion may seem like something from the future. Yet, curating our digital appearance is already a big part of everyone's life. From cultivating an Instagram aesthetic to putting your best foot forward on LinkedIn, we are thoughtful about our online impressions.

(Hopefully!)

For gamers, digital fashion takes the form of "skins": outfits and weapons that decorate the in-game avatars. On Fortnite, a typical skin costs between $2 and $20 USD⁴. The skins are just for the aesthetic and do not impact the player's abilities, illustrating a market for virtual self-expression.

Some of the rarest and most exclusive skins, like the Skull Trooper Skin, are resold online for thousands of dollars⁵.

Experts predict the market for "skins" in video games will hit $50 billion USD by 202²⁶.

Experts predict the market for "skins" in video games will hit $50 billion USD by 2022 (Courtesy of Fortnite)

Louis Vuitton and League of Legends: an Unlikely Partnership

In 2019, the luxury brand, Louis Vuitton, designed a series of skins for League of Legends, a popular multiplayer game⁷. Following its digital release, Louis Vuitton created real-life pieces to compliment the skin collection.

To everyone's surprise, the once-nerdy world of esports has been infiltrated by high fashion.

Photo by Francois Le Nguyen on Unsplash

1. Digital Fashion is a Sustainable Solution to Fast Fashion

Eight to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the fashion industry¹³.

Nearly three-fifths of all clothing produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within years of being made¹⁴.

Digital clothing allows consumers to live out their fast fashion fantasies while drastically reducing the environmental impact.

When you buy a piece of digital clothing, you aren't just reducing the impact of that one t-shirt. You are also reducing waste generated during the design and sampling process. The firm, Dress-X, claims that the total carbon footprint of producing one digital item is 95% less than an average physical garment¹⁵.

Even large retailers with physical products can benefit from digital fashion without changing their product offerings. For example, PUMA partnered with The Fabricant to create a capsule collection, 'Day Zero', that had a low environmental impact¹⁶. For this campaign, PUMA created a digital proof of concept that eliminated the need for sampling, handling, traveling, and other logistics. Once the proof of concept was perfected, they produced and sold the physical product.

2. Digital Fashion Reduces Production Costs and the Time to Market

By adapting their product innovation process, PUMA reduced their water usage by up to 17.4% for this collection¹⁷. PUMA also reduced their time to market and costs by 30%.

3. It's Body and Gender Inclusive

Digital fashion promotes the idea that anyone, regardless of body type, size, or gender, can wear anything. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "one size fits all."

The majority of, if not all, digital fashion brands provide genderless, and sizeless pieces. Digital clothing can truly be universal.

Creative and perhaps, gravity-defying digital shoes (Courtesy of Happy99)

4. It Provides Endless Possibilities for Creative Self-Expression

Digital designers are not limited by silly things like gravity and physics. Designers can experiment with materials and textures.

"Within the digital world, we can go completely crazy. We can wear a dress made of water or have lights everywhere and change your textile according to your mood," says Amber Slooten, the co-founder of The Fabricant¹⁸.

Ultimately, this opens the door for more self-expression. You could find pieces that reflect a more abstract version of how you wish to be seen.

Screen capture of Dress-X's website (Courtesy of Dress-X)

The Technology Isn't Quite There... Yet!

At the moment, digital fashion firms rely on employees digitally fitting the outfits to a client's photo. This process of "digital dressing" typically uses 3D modelling software. Some firms use CGI software to digitally edit or "fit" the clothes onto the customer.

"The technology, in general, is not there yet to recognize a body to implement [digital dressing]," explains Natalia Modenova, the co-founder of Dress-X¹⁹. "The AI is not there to entirely automate this process."

Digital dressing is by no means instantaneous. For example, it takes the firm Tribute between three and five hours to customize the digital garment to one's photo.

However, technology will quickly improve.

Think of how bad those first few Snapchat filters were.

I'm excited for the day where you can stream a video while wearing a digital outfit.

It's Expensive

It's already hard to justify buying an expensive piece of clothing that you can wear in real life. If it wasn't, exploitive and unsustainable fast fashion wouldn't be popular.

(I'm as guilty as anybody for indulging in fast fashion, so no judgment!)

In general, we undervalue digital goods. One study found we're only willing to pay $1 for a digital photo, yet we'll pay $3 for a physical image²⁰. Another study found we are willing to pay more for a physical copy of a book ($9.59 on average) than a digital version ($6.94)²¹.

You may think the average person is not going to buy clothing that they can't actually wear.

Yet, once you consider the potential price of the digital item, this may change.

You may not spend $40 on a digital top, but you might spend $5.

Remember, there is a proven market for digital fashion...

Yes, gamers buy skins for their in-game avatars.

(As I said, it's expected to be a $50 billion USD industry.)

But, gamers are not alone. Members of Zwift, an indoor cycling app, use the in-game currency to purchase biking gear for their digital avatars²². These brand-loyal cyclists often want their digital selves to use the same brands and products that they use in real life.

Zwift provides its cyclists with the ability to customize their avatar with their favourite brands (Courtesy of Zwift)

It is undoubtedly a bizarre idea.

Having a digital wardrobe is something straight out of a sci-fi movie.

However, the same thing was said when our parents fantasized about calling their friends through their wristwatches. Today, there's a whole industry of smartwatches that connect people across the globe.

While I don't plan on switching to an entirely virtual wardrobe anytime soon, the concept of digital fashion has caught my attention.

I see my online persona as an extension of myself.

As a way of curating how I want to be seen.

I am most excited about the possibilities digital fashion provides for self-expression and sustainability.

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Why Digital Clothing is 2021's Most Exciting Tech Trend

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Imagine a world where your clothes are made of pixels rather than textiles. One in three women considers a piece of clothing "old" after one or two wears¹. Fast fashion is popularizing the idea that great style is synonymous with new outfits.

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Prognostication is always risky. And the last two calendar years have demonstrated just how problematic it can be to try and predict the specifics of what's going to happen a few weeks from now - let alone a full twelve months. At the time I sit down to write this, it seems basically 50/50 as to whether more COVID-related movement restrictions will be brought in alongside the first cold draughts of 2022 air. And retail - along with hospitality, fitness, and a host of other industries that at least partly hinge on bringing people into physical spaces - is staring at an uncertain horizon, with the faint spectres of store closures and dramatic slumps in footfall still lurking in the wings.

If I had to guess, I'd currently lean towards optimism for the general conditions that will govern next year. There's a possibility - and it seems a logical one - that the Omicron wave of the pandemic burns bright but briefly, infecting lots of people very fast, but leading to mild disease in the majority of cases. In that scenario, new restrictions end up being either unnecessary or short-lived, and the UK, EU, and US get 2022 underway with relatively stable foundations beneath them.

There are, of course, no guarantees when it comes to COVID, and on behalf of the entire team at The Interline, I'll take this opportunity to wish everyone we reach a safe holiday season - even if its scope might have to be smaller than we'd like this year. There are better times somewhere around the corner.

Much easier to predict, though, are the general outlines of the demands that are going to be made of fashion technology in 2022. Supply chain resilience and visibility, digital fashion and interactivity, social change, cross-channel retail excellence, behind-the-scenes efficiency, and raw, brass-tacks profitability are the primary things the industry should be concerned about over the next twelve months. And each of those concerns is going to lean on technology to some degree.

But just because it's comparatively simple to paint a rough picture of where we're heading, that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to get there. The demands I've listed are going to ask a lot of solutions, services, and people, and while the fashion industry has talent and technology in abundance, the next year is set to test them both to their limits.

So as 2021 draws to a close, I want to set out what I consider to be the three big asks the industry should have from fashion technology in 2022. And of course The Interline has plans to talk about all of them - and much more - from January onwards.

Reinforcing supply chains. And redesigning them, too.

While ongoing supply chain disruption can make for some funny seasonal content, its persistent effects are going to be much less humorous. Once considered a temporary phenomenon, the hugely inflated cost of shipping physical goods from one side of the world to another could become a more permanent factor - translating into an uplift in both the cost of goods for brands and retailers, and further inflation in retail prices for shoppers.

Combine this with lasting unpredictability around when - and to what extent - different production markets are going to be affected by the pandemic again, and the previously straightforward act of getting things made and having them sent to consumers could become even more complicated than it already is. And it's worth noting that COVID's impact on sourcing and manufacturing destinations could be both direct - through factory closures, and worker shortages caused by an acute public health crisis - and indirect, as different regions struggle in different ways to recover from that acute crisis without the same social safety nets that exist in consumption markets, potentially leading to greater political upheaval.

In this context, technology is going to be asked to step in in several ways.

First as a protector: reinforcing existing supply chain relationships through objective, independently-verifiable data, by offering intuitive ways to employ established standards for good sourcing practice and fair labour, and by creating systems for two-way collaboration, co-creation, and mutual accountability.

Second as a tool for active change - not just in a social sense, although the mandate for equality is strong - but by providing a framework for reallocating certain elements of production to new methods and new locations. Digital printing, digital dyeing of threads and yarns, and smart, fully-connected cutting hardware are all completely viable tools, and new commercial models of near-shore and in-country production are already being created using them.

The flourishing of the Metaverse in fashion in 2021 happened fast. As the year draws to a close, the world's biggest brands are making acquisitions and strategic hires to steer their ships into uncharted, all-digital waters.

But despite the prominence of the Metaverse in boardroom discussion and industry analysis this year, quite what it's going to mean for the fashion industry to have a lasting, commercially-successful, and technological sustainable presence in one or more real-time worlds is still unclear.

As we enter 2022, the possibility space seems vast. And that's more than likely because it is; fashion has dipped its toes into not only one of the broader consumer technology industry's biggest new initiatives in decades, but also the pre-existing and rapidly-shifting landscape of videogames. This is, to put it bluntly, not the kind of entrance that comes without creating some major ripple effects afterwards, and as 2022 wears on, fashion brands are likely to begin asking themselves what a viable long-term Metaverse business model looks like, once the initial fervour around being able to make money from digital assets dies down.

And behind the scenes is the lingering question of whether the Metaverse, in its near-term state, can actually deliver what fashion seems to want: a universally-accessible, interoperable digital layer on the world that allows for consistency of expression and identity between different experiences. For the foreseeable future, that vision is going to remain unfulfilled for purely practical reasons, according to one of the world's premiere chipmakers.

But even though several hurdles stand in the way of the utopian vision for a single Metaverse, fashion still stands to make considerable headway in this new area in 2022, and this is going to place a significant burden on technology platforms. For brands looking to sell digital garments without changing the 3D design and simulation environments they work in, pathways will need to be built to allow existing workflows to serve new, all-digital markets. And for shoppers that want to buy and wear digital fashions in the real-time worlds, experiences, and games they already occupy, greater portability of those assets will need to accompany a far more intuitive, turnkey process of purchase and ownership.

All of these things are within the fashion industry's grasp, but next year and beyond, technology still has some real heavy-lifting to do.

Prioritising profitability.

For all the excitement that surrounds new possibilities like digital fashion, there's something much more prosaic that technology will be asked to do in 2022: maximise the profit margin that suppliers and their brand customers are able to make on each individual unit.

Whether the more positive pandemic-related outlook for next year is realised or not, it seems inevitable that businesses of all shapes and sizes will be asked to make difficult choices - and potentially compromises - in how they bring products to market. Chief among those will be which products to introduce in the first place - a multi-faceted decision that will be driven not just by trend, or raw material price, or environmental impact, but by a complex set of variables that ultimately determine whether or not there's sufficient money to be made in creating something.

Creating actionable insights from that combination of factors is set to be one of the most prominent use cases for technology in 2022, with the market for retail intelligence platforms likely to explode as brand and retail businesses take a cold, calculating look at the market and zero in on those products (and the processes and components that comprise them) that will deliver the greatest return.

Targeting greater profitability in this way will require the full complement of enterprise technologies, all working in unison. From PLM and ERP to planning and warehousing, these solutions may not be as glamorous as multimedia collaborations, but in a year that's likely to be characterised by uncertainty, they will be essential tools for brands, retailers, and suppliers looking to shore up their bottom line.

The Interline will return in earnest in January 2022, with a special focus on intelligent retail that will kick-start our 2022 editorial calendar. We wish all our readers a happy holiday season in the meantime.

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Fashion Technology In 2022: The Big Asks - The Interline

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Prognostication is always risky. And the last two calendar years have demonstrated just how problematic it can be to try and predict the specifics of what's going to happen a few weeks from now - let alone a full twelve months.