Explore the key insights into product development and consumer behaviour shaping the fashion industry for 2024.
Thrift-dult
Office dressing gets turned on its head for this trend, which rejects traditional work fashion personas and fuses personal style and professional identity for a fresh, playful spin on nine-to-five dressing.
Key to this look is the mixing of thrifted and new via eclectic DIY styling and craft-led customisation. Style-aware thrift-dulters use their brand-new buys to pull this vision together with a fashion twist, making sure each purchase can take them from client meetings to midweek drinks. The look has all the hallmarks of nonconformity and inclusivity you would expect from Gen Z, with gender-inclusivity central. Blazers, pinstripes, ties and ‘80s shoulder pads form the basis of thrift finds, while reworked and twisted tailoring offers a high-fashion take on city dressing for a new generation.
Biodegradable denim
Innovators are creating new fibre solutions to reduce jeans waste.
With more than 2bn pairs of jeans created every year globally, the need to deal with mountains of apparel waste demands diverse solutions. While the fashion industry continues to make progress in moving to a circular model, starting the journey to recycle more of the garments it creates still only accounts for around 1% of clothing, so it will be essential to enable waste to safely biodegrade in natural environments.
In 2024, Turkish denim mill specialist Calik Denim will release jeans with a coating that enables over 99% of the garment to biodegrade in nature in just 210 days. Candiani Denim has launched biodegradable stretch denim using its patented plant-based COREVA technology, where rubber-like stretch replaces oil-based fibres. Fellow Italian brand Jacob Cohën has produced jeans which are entirely compostable.
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