Step into the future with WGSN’s latest forecast, Top Trends for 2024 & Beyond. While the world catches up, we’ve been living and breathing 2024 for a while.
London, January 2024 - Each year we unveil the 13 game-changing trends that will influence fashion, interiors, beauty, tech and food and drink in the coming years. From sustainable backyard beauty to intelligent AI assistants, discover the top trends that will define consumers’ lives.
The top trends for 2024 are:
- Apricot Crush: WGSN’s Colour of the Year for 2024 is a psychological mood booster and a warm and restorative hue that reflects a growing focus on holistic lifestyles. A rebalancing bright with an activating vitamin-inspired tone, it’s an inspiring hue for uncertain times.
- Backyard beauty: soil and insects will be embraced as alternative ingredient sources, rich in skin-beneficial actives. Sustainable beauty brands will encourage caring for soil as we would our skin, implementing circular systems and making use of ‘soil saviours’, such as microbes and worms.
- Thrift-dult: city dressing for a new generation, this trend fuses personal style and professional identity for a fresh, playful spin on nine-to-five dressing. Thrift finds of blazers, pinstripes, ties and ‘80s shoulder pads blend with reworked tailoring.
- Meals as drinks: as demand for savoury tastes and new sensorial experiences rises, mixologists are embracing bitterness, spice and salinity, using classic meal profiles for drink flavours with umami deliciousness. Make mine a cold pizza or Thai beef salad.
- AI co-creation: GenAI (generative AI) tools will increasingly be part of the workflow of designers. AI co-creation can improve productivity, with no-code/low-code AI designers focused on the creative aspect of work. Organisations will need to review processes to welcome AI-savvy workers keen on experimentation.
- Plant milking: as the need for alternative ingredient sourcing drives a revolution in sustainable beauty, plant milking will thrive. This non-destructive, aeroponic cultivation method extracts the active ingredients from the plant’s roots several times a year, maximising yields and minimising land and water use.
- Auto-tainment: seamless tech and smart assistants will bring the capabilities of the living room to cars, making them mobile third spaces offering immersive gaming and entertainment. Flexible configurations, lounge seating and elevated materials will proliferate, alongside wellness-boosting olfactory and lighting effects.
- Social learning: social learning spaces combine collective experiences with education opportunities. These institutions may replace the campus or office in an increasingly remote world, but speak to individuals’ passions, niche interests and curiosities rather than their professions, helping them find like-minded communities.
- Multi-species home: these homes respond to an emerging nontraditional family and are applicable across all generations, from Boomers and Gen-X empty-nesters who adopt birds, cats and dogs to Millennials and Gen Z who see their pets as children and their plants as companions.
- Biodegradable denim: with more than 2bn pairs of jeans created globally every year, it’s essential fashion waste can safely biodegrade in natural environments. Leading denim brands are tackling apparel waste with diverse solutions, such as biodegradable stretch denim.
- AI assistants: AI tools are supporting time-pushed consumers with the menial tasks or chores they don’t want to do, such as searching for a dream house, planning a vacation, personal shopping or even life coaching. Yes, the age of the AI assistant has arrived.
- Third-culture cuisine: globalisation gives rise to a wave of third-culture chefs creating cuisines that mix their inherited culinary traditions with the food and drink cultures where they currently live. By 2024, look out for genres such as Japanese-South African.
- Curtains: Consumers will embrace curtains once again. As space definers or to keep the heat and cold out, they work as aesthetically pleasing fabric insulators and energy savers. New phase-changing materials protect against temperature extremes caused by the climate crisis, too.
WGSN’s creative direction combines generative AI with human craft
This year marks a significant milestone as WGSN integrated the power of AI into their creative direction for the first time. This strategic direction underpins their newly released annual report, 'Top Trends for 2024 & Beyond’. Utilising a blend of visual forecasting expertise, generative AI, and human creativity, the report showcases a synergy between these two worlds.
Lisa White, WGSN Creative Director, said: “Back in 2015, WGSN predicted that AI would be the next big tech leap. Now, we are at the cusp of AI becoming a major digital tool for all industries–from healthcare to fashion, urban planning to industrial design, agriculture to art–and will also be a tool for many consumers.
“Staying true to our forecast, our Top Trends for 2024 were expressed by blending the digital and physical: AI and the human hand, directed by human minds. In the future, digital and craft will not be an either/or but an and/and proposition - they are both important tools for creativity. We will increasingly see collaborations between humans and tech, in all industries. This is not without concern–and at WGSN we are proceeding carefully and transparently according to our internal charter. AI will not extinguish the physical–it will enhance it: humans will continue to use their first tools, their minds and their hands, to create in the future. The digital and physical worlds are more connected than ever, and our 2024 Top Trends are expressed as a visual conversation between our human minds, AI and handcraft.”
The Top Trends for 2024 and Beyond report can be downloaded at no cost here.
Notes to editors
For quotes and interviews with WGSN’s consumer experts, contact press@wgsn.com.
About WGSN
WGSN is the global authority on consumer, lifestyle and product design trends, helping brands around the world create the right products at the right time for tomorrow’s consumer.
WGSN's trusted consumer and design forecasts power outstanding product design, enabling our customers to create a better future. Our services cover consumer insights, beauty, consumer tech, fashion, interiors, lifestyle, food and drink forecasting, data analytics and expert advisory.
Visit wgsn.com