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Out & About: Curatorial research trip to the Fashion Museum, Bath

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Associate Curator Christina Johnson recently traveled to the Fashion Museum  in Bath, England, where she spent a week researching museum founder Doris Langley Moore, thanks to receiving a travel grant from the Costume Society of America.

My interest in scholar, fashion collector, and museum founder Doris Langley Moore began when I was a young girl discovering the world of fashion history. I stumbled upon her 1949 book, T he Woman in Fashion , on one of my many treks to the library. The book includes photographs of Moore’s famous friends wearing her private collection of antique clothing and accessories. I was transfixed by her beautiful styling of the models and couldn’t get enough of her erudite writing.

Little did I know I would have ample opportunity to ‘get to know’ Doris in my work at the FIDM Museum. Just over a decade ago, we received a donation of nineteenth-century clothing from the estate of Helen Larson, a Whittier, California-based collector. I recognized some of the items had been photographed in The Woman in Fashion, including this Victorian silk brocade gown . I had a hunch that Helen must have purchased these items directly from Doris. But I couldn’t prove it at that time.

In 2010, the FIDM Museum began a fundraising campaign  to acquire the remainder of Helen Larson’s private collection— The Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection . In addition to amazing garments   and accessories, the collection includes Helen Larson’s personal collecting archive—letters, notes, auction records, and photographs. Poring over the archive, I was so excited to find hundreds of letters written between Helen and Doris spanning over 20 years, tracking not only hundreds of purchases, but a relationship that developed from matter-of-fact business transactions into a treasured friendship. And yes, they proved Helen purchased almost all of the garments and accessories presented in The Woman in Fashion !

Thanks to Fashion Museum Manager Rosemary Harden and Collections Assistant Elaine Uttley, I had full access to the Museum’s institutional archives, and focused on letters written by and to Doris, object accession cards from the original donation, object and installation photographs, newspaper clippings, and exhibition files. I found this wonderful Picture Post magazine, with the cover girl wearing our 1850s gown!

The magazine dates to an era when people did not understand the conservation issues arising from wearing antique fashion intended for preservation. The article includes a portrait of Doris cataloging items in the collection.

I know what it’s like to plan exhibitions—in addition to the research involved, when I curate a project, I spend hours designing the space, selecting mounts, and arranging objects to tell a story. There is usually a lot of scratch paper involved, more messy handwriting than I care to admit, and also doodling! Doris did the same thing for her first installation at The Museum of Costume, as can be seen in this notebook she kept to document the process. The different mannequin groups are being arranged by theme on this page.

These documents are not digitized yet, so I spent a lot of time with my digital camera as I looked through the papers, taking photos to be carefully read over later.

Are you interested to know who took this photo of me hard at work? FIDM Museum Curator Kevin Jones, who accompanied me on the trip and was an amazing research assistant! There’s no way I could have made my way through all of the materials without him. Thanks!

Finding mannequins with bodies and demeanors appropriate for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century fashion can be challenging. In an era in which the specialized Kyoto mannequin  had not been invented, Doris resorted to utilizing period partial-wax mannequins, as can be seen in this newspaper article with 1890s wax figures.

Doris Langey Moore had a brilliant mind and a dynamic personality that came across loud and clear in her many letters. But historic fashion was only one of her many fascinations: she was also interested in the theatre, was a jewelry collector, novelist, and a well-known Lord Byron scholar (she even married on his grave!). She brought curiosity and passion to all of her projects, qualities I aspire to bring to a long-term project I am embarking upon: her biography.

One response to “ Out & About: Curatorial research trip to the Fashion Museum, Bath ”

Christina, what a wonderful article! What a lovely job you are doing there. Congratulations!

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Designing the future: unveiling rising fashion research hubs

Aligned with WGSN's forecasts, we introduce seven cities gaining recognition for their vibrancy, cultural relevance and fashion innovation – perfect for you to consider on your next fashion research trip.

Barcelona is fast emerging as a key player in the vintage fashion market, especially in The El Raval and Gràcia districts. Must-visit shops include Casa Le Swing and the House of Rowdy concept store.

Following the city’s legacy in fashion innovation, Antwerp has become a compact alternative to Paris. We Are Labels embodies the city’s trend of creating real sanctuaries for womenswear and Studio Play is a great example of the redefinition of kidswear through creativity, functionality and sustainability.

With influential events such as Copenhagen Fashion Week , the Danish capital is becoming the global reference for sustainable fashion. Don’t miss Han Kjøbenhavn , known for its streetwear and eyewear, as well as Colorful Standard .

The US and Central America

Miami blends its traditions with art deco aesthetics, Latin influences and forward-thinking fashion, maturing as a hub for swimwear. Look to brands like Krel Wear for knitwear that go from beach to nightlife or  Thrifts + Threads , which creates It-girl cover-ups.

In Mexico City, local fashion brands embrace heritage and innovation, making it a key destination as consumers seek real connections. Gather inspiration for traditional textiles and print with a modern take at Graziano & Gutiérrez and PAY'S .

Seoul has become one of the go-tos for youth fashion with the aid of K-pop and experiences that merge art and fashion are continuously pushing boundaries in the city.  Visual Aid houses the most popular local brands, while Stand Oil is a strong example of the city's interiors and accessories game combined.

Bangkok is growing into an unmissable hub for unique designs. On top of the iconic mall culture, the city has also been nurturing fashion labels pushing creative boundaries. Brands such as  Sretsis offer fantasy-like designs, while small shops like Frank Garcon  are attracting young people with affordable price tags.

If you’re a WGSN subscriber, make sure to check out our Rising Fashion Hubs Guide . Live now on the site.

Know what's next. Become a WGSN member today to benefit from our daily trend intelligence, retail analytics, consumer insights and bespoke consultancy services.

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Textile Society of America

Programs Texture

Research travel grant.

TSA’s Research Travel Grant supports two research travel grants (up to $1000 each) .

Thanks to the generosity of Elena Phipps, TSA President 2012-2014, and Alan Finkel, TSA is pleased to offer this grant for its third season. The award supports individual TSA members in textiles research-related travel—local, regional, and international of any type, specifically for the in-person study of textiles. The grant may be used for travel to conduct research in a museum, to meet with weavers or artists in their studio and/or local home environments, to see a special textile exhibition, etc. The grant is not intended for travel to TSA symposia. 

You must be a current TSA member to receive this grant. Check your membership or renew at  https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/membership/

We hope that others may be inspired to contribute to this fund to enable its growth and to provide additional support for this very important opportunity for TSA members. 

Please consider contributing to this and other scholarship and financial awards that help us in our mission to support the work of TSA members and our extended textile communities around the world!

2023 Research Travel Grant Recipients

Joelle Firzli is multicultural fashion researcher. Her main area of interest is the intersection between fashion and cultural sustainability, exploring how the business and theory of fashion can help maintain and promote cultural identity, preservation and legacy, as well as social and climate justice. Joelle is also a fashion entrepreneur and the co-founder of Tribute Collective, a responsible multidisciplinary organization focused on elevating visibility for global ethical fashion and design, and on community building through programming such as exhibits, workshops, and discussions about the global fashion industry.

“This proposal seeks support to offset the cost of traveling to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, to research, study, and learn about the history and the techniques behind the making of mouchetée fabric. The TSA’s Research Travel Grant will provide me the opportunity to spend time in the studio and workshop of Pathé’O, one the most celebrated and prolific Ivorian designers whose work has been widely acknowledged for its contribution to the collective visual culture of African and global fashion. This support will further enable me to complete one of the chapters on Ivorian textiles and heritage, part of a bigger project on researching the history of textiles and fashion in Cote d’Ivoire. I hope it will serve as a handbook by which designers, students and scholars can better comprehend how Ivorians shape their sartorial and aesthetic identities and re-valorize their cultures through fashion.”

Ashley Newsome Kubley has over 15 years of education and professional experience in the fashion design, apparel production, and textiles industries. She is passionate about the advancement of maker culture as well as the implementation of socially and environmentally sustainable practices in the apparel industry. Her research focuses on bridging the gap between historical techniques and contemporary technologies, pursuing projects at the intersection of history and new technological innovations specific to textiles.

“This grant will support my project, the Maya Youth Artisanship Initiative. The initial project work in 2019 included in-person artisan workshops, interviews and a physical exhibition that was installed in the Museo Artes Populares in Merida, Mexico between August 2021 and April 2022. A virtual exhibit of the work was also created. Between January 2024-August 2024 in Merida I plan to conduct artisan interviews, observations of henequen fiber processing, dyeing and weaving, and relocation of exhibition assets and artifacts created during the MYAI project to the U.S. for further exhibition; and archive/document Louise Vogel’s rare collection of Henequen fiber textile artifacts in partnership with the Museo Del Mundo Maya.”

2019 Research Travel Grant Recipients

Elaine K. Ng is an artist whose work explores the physical and psychological structures of site. Through the use of material and pattern, her sculptural objects and installations examine the visual language, perception, and collective knowledge of place. She holds a BA from the University of California, Davis, an MBA/MA from Southern Methodist University, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She exhibits and lectures internationally and has been a Visiting Professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University and a Visiting Artist at Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA). She was a resident artist at Haystack’s Open Studio Residency in 2017 and has been selected for the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in 2019. In 2017-18 she was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship for research in Taiwan.

“A TSA travel grant will assist in my travel to Japan to research the history and learn the techniques of kasuri, the form of ikat resist dyeing and weaving unique to Japan. The first segment of my project will involve attending workshops at the Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto for a month. After developing this foundation, I plan to conduct additional research on the regional variations of kasuri in Nara, Karume, Fukuoka, and Okinawa by visiting textile museums, artists’ studios, and small-scale weaving facilities. In learning about kasuri (the techniques, its history, and the regional variations) I hope to develop a more intimate understanding to the point where I can utilize the method directly and indirectly in my own artwork. […]As someone of East Asian descent, I often notice a lack of resources about East Asian weaving in western academia. Much of the information seems to be perfunctory, exoticized, or only pictorial. This is especially true with kasuri, as it is so regionally specific and knowledge of the technique is waning. I hope the month of workshops at Kawashima will provide me with an opportunity to immerse deeply into learning about kasuri in the culture of its origin, and open the door for me to do additional research more easily on the history and variations of kasuri in other areas of Japan.”

Elizabeth Kalbfleisch is an art historian based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. She researches and publishes in the field of modern and contemporary Canadian Indigenous art and textiles, and textiles by Canadian women artists more broadly. Forthcoming publications this year include, “Celebration or Craftsploitation? Cultural Diplomacy, Marketing and Coast Salish Knitting,” in the Journal of Canadian Art History, and with Janet Berlo, “Indigenous Textiles of North America: A Century of Exhibitions,” in the Blackwell Companion to Textile Culture.

“My new research focuses on the influence of government and corporate commissions in the flourishing of textile art by Canadian women artists (settler and Indigenous) in the 1960s and 1970s and the role of these textiles in public spaces. This project takes the form of several case studies, each focusing on a different artist or group of artists and the commission of a major work of public art. I am seeking a TSA Research Travel Grant to conduct research for one of these case studies. The focus of this research is Mariette Vermette-Rousseau (1926-2006), the highly esteemed weaver from Québec, who made the stage curtain for the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. This woven curtain, Mortaises rouge dans le noir (1966-1971), was presented as a gift from the government of Canada to the United States to mark the inauguration of the Kennedy Center in 1971. I believe it to be an excellent case study through which to broach the relationship between textiles and cultural diplomacy, a topic explored in my previous research on Northwest Coast Indigenous knitting from this era. […] Ultimately, my research on Vermette-Rousseau would form a chapter for a book of multiple case studies.”

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16 Fashion Collections to Inspire Your Next Destination

By Ellen Freeman

When asked about the motivation behind their collections, designers often give nebulous explanations like “fluidity” or “strength.” That kind of subtlety is all well and good — you don’t always want the theme to hit you over the head. But when designers can take inspiration from a specific location and create work that gets us dreaming of travel, it’s pure fashion magic. If you’re planning on doing some globe-trotting, but don’t know which direction to point your compass, take a look at these 16 fashion collections inspired by locales near and far.

From traditional Liberian dress to Parisian street style, Rio’s Carnival color palettes to classic English tartan, these worldly styles from the latest fall, haute couture and resort collections are escapist fashion at its best. If a place can give rise to a fashion collection, a fashion collection can definitely send you on your adventure. Click through to see these jet set-approved designs guaranteed to add a few points to your bucket list and inspire your next destination.

16 Fashion Collections to Inspire Your Next Destination (Hilton)

Chanel cruise 2017: cuba.

Karl Lagerfeld wasn't just inspired by Cuba — he took the entire Chanel Cruise 2017 collection there. Giving new meaning to the term "cruise collection," the American press covering the show arrived in Havana a mere two hours before the first U.S. cruise ship to dock there in decades. Now that Cuba is open to travel, we're dying to see the colorful Old Havana that inspired the collection's Panama hats, macrame dresses and vintage car prints.

Image: Courtesy of Chanel 

Valentino Resort 2017: Cuba

Chanel wasn't the only fashion house to take inspiration from Cuba: The Valentino Resort 2017 collection bloomed with Cuba's national flower, the white ginger lily, alongside appropriately tropical motifs and camouflage. As designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli told Vogue , "The thing we love about Cuba is the many different memories of the place—African, Spanish, ’50s America. It gave us a real freedom to mix, like a souvenir, lots of pieces together."

Image: Courtesy of Valentino 

Gucci Cruise 2017: England

From a runway show in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey soundtracked by the traditional ballad "Scarborough Fair" to tartan skirts and Union Jack sweaters, the Gucci Cruise 2017 collection was a celebration of merry old England. The island is notorious for its gray skies, so you may need one of the designer's rain bonnets or trenchcoats if you plan on taking a stroll in the classic English gardens that inspired the collection's rose-embroidered handbags.

Image: @madamefigarofr

Elie Saab Resort 2017: Japan

Japan has long been a wellspring of fashion inspiration and the latest collection making us want to book a direct flight for Tokyo is the Elie Saab Resort 2017 offering. The feminine designs draw from the country's traditional culture with waist-cinching obi belts and kimono sleeves, while cherry blossom prints reference Japan's classic floral symbol.

Image: Courtesy of Elie Saab

Versace Resort 2017: America

Destinations don't have to be far-flung to be inspiring, as Donatella Versace proved with her Resort 2017 collection based on the classic American road trip. The cross-country adventure embarked in New York City with city-slicking designs featuring primary colors that echoed Times Square's neon lights, got lost in the Midwest with prairie florals and patchworks, then finally arrived in Los Angeles with leather and Hollywood glitz.

Image: Courtesy of Versace

Tracy Reese Fall 2016: Detroit

Detroit may not be as glamorous a destination as Paris or Tokyo, but one look at the  Tracy Reese Fall 2016 lookbook and you may be packing your bags for the Motor City. The designer honored her hometown with a collection inspired by a 30s speakeasy with garters, slouchy pinstripe suits and crocheted lace. "It's a city that is so rich in culture," said Reese.

Image: Imaxtree

Louis Vuitton Cruise 2017: Rio de Janeiro

Rainbow hues and Carnival-ready ruffles epitomized the Brazilian-inspired vibe of the  Louis Vuitton Cruise 2017  collection, which was presented at Rio de Janeiro's Niterói Contemporary Art Museum. Athleisure styling, sporty checkers and scuba fabric gave a big nod to the city's role as the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. We would have loved to wear any of these sophisticated-casual designs while cheering in the stands.

Image: Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

Tory Burch Resort 2017: Jamaica

The white sands and palm fronds of Jamaica couldn't supply a more appropriate image for a resort collection and that's just what Tory Burch had in mind for Resort 2017. Just say the word and we're ready to get our groove back in the collection's dip-dyed indigo maxis, raffia slides and shell-adorned accessories.

Image: Courtesy of Tory Burch

Jenny Packham Resort 2017: India

For her Resort 2017 collection, Jenny Packham took fashion lovers on a trip to India with gowns fit for a monsoon wedding. The sweeping silk skirts, crystal-encrusted paisley embellishments and spicy color palette featuring ochre, aqua and pink brought to mind Bollywood royalty.

Image: Courtesy of Jenny Packham

Banana Republic Fall 2016: France

France was the inspiration behind the Banana Republic Fall 2016 collection with looks pulled from Senior Vice President of Design Michael Anderson's research trip to Lyon, Provence and Paris to document real French street style. The result was Breton striped pullovers, trenchcoats and, of course, the ubiquitous beret — providing not only your next destination inspo, but a guarantee that you won't look like a tourist once you get there.

Carven Fall 2016: Kathmandu

Carven 's designers told the story of a city-slicking girl just back from a journey to Kathmandu. The Fall 2016 collection wove in souvenirs from her trip with exotic twists, like layered Nepalese prints, Sherpa knits, lots of shearling and a moto jacket with a mountain range graphic that brings to mind the Himalayas.

Libertine Fall 2016: Mount Everest

Nepal's majestic mountain range is clearly awe-inspiring — and fashion-inspiring at that. Libertine referenced the world's highest peak with its Fall 2016 collection, which started with designer Johnson Hartig's recurring dream about attempting to scale Mount Everest.

Ulyana Sergeenko Fall 2016 Haute Couture: Russia

So you may not be able to travel back in time to Soviet-era Russia, but Ulyana Sergeenko's Fall 2016 Haute Couture collection (inspired by the bygone era) just may make you want to go searching for the vestiges. The designer has made a name for herself with collections paying homage to the motherland, but this one focused on 60s Russia with handmade lace and mosaic furs inspired by Soviet craftsmanship. 

Edun Resort 2017: Africa

Africa is vast and diverse, but the Edun Resort 2017 collection pulled from such far-reaching sources that you could use it to design a complete tour of the continent. Vibrant stripes and draping referenced the ceremonial attire of the Gio people of northeastern Liberia and looks utilized ethically-sourced African materials : South African organic cotton canvas, Ethiopian jersey, Madagascan sweaters and Kenyan hand-carved mother-of-pearl buttons.

Image: Courtesy of Edun

Hellessy Resort 2017: South America

The corrida de sortija is a traditional gaucho festival that takes place in the South American Río de la Plata region and it caught the eye of designer Sylvie Millstein who used it as the starting point for her Hellessy Resort 2017 collection. If the real gauchos dress anything like the collection's Argentinian-inspired chambray, silk jacquard, blouson sleeves, micro florals and split trousers, we'd love to see it with our own eyes.

Image: Courtesy of Hellessy

Bibhu Mohapatra Fall 2016: China

Bibhu Mohapatra whisked us off with his Fall 2016 collection inspired by the Empress Dowager Cixi, a concubine who went on to be the last empress of China. Splashes of Forbidden City vermilion, dragonfly motifs, embroidered ginkgo leaves and rich jacquard all recall the Far East.

Ellen Freeman has been contributing to the Fashion Spot since 2010. Since graduating with a degree in comparative literature from Haverford College, her celebrity fashion, wellness, arts and travel writing has appeared in publications including the Matador Network and Philadelphia Weekly. Also a certified yoga instructor, Ellen currently lives in the Japanese countryside—but misses thrift store spelunking in her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

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How Global Luxury Travel Trends Will Impact Fashion

Tapping into the touristic expenditure of wealthy consumers has long been a cornerstone of the luxury industry. In 2022, it was not just at home that Americans continued to shop — as pandemic-related travel restrictions lifted, shopping in Europe was made even more attractive to Americans bolstered by a strong dollar against the euro and pound sterling. Luxury brands in Europe cited American tourists as a key driver of increased first-half sales, including a 47 percent rise at LVMH and 53 percent rise at Kering, according to the company’s financial reporting.

However, while travelling Americans mattered most last year, this year it will certainly be the Chinese consumer once again. In a recent McKinsey & Co. survey, 40 percent of Chinese travellers said they wanted their next trip to be international. While Hong Kong became accessible to mainland China late last year, and Japan was especially popular during last month’s cherry blossom season, Chinese travel agency Trip.com also identified Thailand, Singapore, Australia and South Korea as some of the most-booked outbound destinations for Chinese travellers in March.

It will not be until this quarter or the second half of the year that most destinations will see a bigger wave — the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute forecasts 110 million outbound trips from the mainland this year. The institute cites the figure as two-thirds of the traffic seen in 2019, due to capacity limitations more than anything else.

Global Blue, the duty-free tax refund company, also said that in March, mainland Chinese spending in Europe had already reached nearly half of what it was in 2019 — a large rise from the 22 percent seen in the first two months of the year. The recovery is expected to gradually strengthen in the months ahead, but analysts predict that Chinese outbound travel will not overtake pre-Covid levels until next year.

However, to take advantage of the bumper tourism flow expected in 2023, and drive performance in today’s market — businesses need to align to emerging trends in luxury travel, addressing shifting consumer sentiment towards expenditure and leisure time.

To discover more about how consumers are replacing bucket lists with revenge buying, and how remote working has blended travel itineraries to create a “bleisure” culture, BoF sits down with Marriott International’s president of luxury, Tina Edmundson, who oversees nearly 500 properties globally for the group — with 200 further locations from the company’s 8 luxury hotel brands planned.

How would you characterise the demand for travel as we enter the second half of 2023?

Recovery in the luxury segment, particularly for our industry, was swift compared to other segments. Travel is booming and we don’t anticipate it will taper off any time soon. Year to date, our rooms booked are 11 percent higher in March 2023 versus 2019. Not only have we recovered versus 2019, we have exceeded it.

We fundamentally believe that coming out of the pandemic, a reprioritisation of values has taken place. Before, people would perceive travel as discretionary. When times were tough — either because you don’t have the time or the money — travel was something that was a nice-to-have. Now, I think we have gone from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have. We have realised through the pandemic that travel is fundamentally a primal desire — we need to do this to be happy.

What shifts in luxury consumer behaviour are you seeing in terms of discretionary expenditure?

We see this shifting notion from being well-travelled to travelling well. We are seeing an indulgence in luxury travel, and a focus on: “If I’m going to do this, if I’m going to make time, I want to connect with people I love, and broaden my horizons. I am going to do it properly.” People have realised that time is short — they want to connect with family, with their friends.

We fundamentally believe that coming out of the pandemic, a reprioritisation of values has taken place.

The number of millionaires and billionaires continues to increase, so that is certainly one piece of it. The second piece is that people want to make a positive contribution in how they travel. They want to discover the world. They want to get immersed in local experiences and they want to do it with a little bit of indulgence. There’s the high-net-worth customer, but there’s also the aspirational customer — a very wide swath of the population that is choosing to go above and beyond, even their means, to have that memory, to have that once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Consumers also want to have that non-traditional experience. So, when they are travelling, they want to experience new things that they haven’t before. We just launched The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection in October last year, and Evrima is our first superyacht - with 149 suites. It has been wildly successful, and we are launching two more in the next few years. Interestingly, 70 percent of the people that have booked Evrima are first-time cruisers. Another recently debuted property, JW Marriott Masai Mara Lodge, has 20 private tents overlooking the River Talek in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve — it is spectacular and there is huge demand for it.

How are business and pleasure itineraries merging and what does that mean for brands and retailers?

Critically, our unlocked desire to travel was coupled with the fact that we have adopted an entirely new way of working remotely. Because we now have the ability to work from anywhere, we can take a long weekend and do a Thursday through Tuesday if we wanted to, with really no issue from an employer perspective.

Another thing that has become more acceptable is the ability to bring along your spouse, your partner, a friend or family on a trip. We have seen that in our data, which has created a need for more connecting rooms and suites so that you can work from the living room and still have a partner or whomever in the space. The work from anywhere mindset, coupled with this fear of missing out and wanting to make travel a priority, all these elements have contributed to a new sort of behaviour.

Now, our business has shifted from being about people that were transient business customers, there for work, to a much more leisure-driven or leisure-conscious experience. We call this combination of business and leisure: “bleisure”. When customers are in that mindset, they tend to be much more relaxed.

Fashion is an important part of the travel experience because when they are in another location, they want to explore what is interesting from a fashion and retail perspective in that destination. When travellers are of a more relaxed mindset, they tend to be much more open to seeing new ideas and to experiencing what is materially important in that locale.

Which countries or regions are driving growth in tourism?

International travel has opened and will continue to recover swiftly and strongly. However, we are seeing significantly increased costs with regards to airfares and capacity issues in many regions. That is putting a spotlight on people prioritising being able to travel easily, because the availability is just low.

That said, we have growth happening all around Australia, and Japan continues to be a hot destination, where we have just opened The Ritz-Carlton, Fukuoka. China is a bit slower right now, but as we see capacity being added from a flight perspective, we are seeing it open up. Outbound mainland Chinese travel is mostly in Asia, so there is a lot of travel to Thailand, for example, but really, we are expecting a sharp ramp up to further international destinations over the next couple of months.

We continue to see huge demand in the world’s most iconic cities. We are currently seeing a lot of activity in the likes of Rome and Madrid — more historically popular destinations. Earlier this year we debuted The Ritz-Carlton, Melbourne, which we opened right before the Australian Grand Prix in the city, and we have also announced that we will be bringing the St. Regis brand to London. Over the spring, we saw huge demand across the United States. So, it’s hard to pinpoint if the centre of gravity in the industry is indeed shifting.

How is the popularity of international destinations evolving?

People are expanding their travel itineraries. If you are going to Paris, you are also going to Bordeaux or other destinations outside of the city. Customers are looking to discover how else they can enrich their experiences and immerse themselves in local culture. These secondary cities have become incredibly important. And, of course, social media is playing an important role in educating consumers, creating desire, and building aspiration to visit.

The luxury customer is looking for their hotel to curate and facilitate the entirety of their experience.

From a consumer perspective, in terms of which second tier cities to look out for, it is less about how many hours away from major travel hubs that they are situated and more about how accessible it is. A traveller might think: If I can get there on a train in a couple of hours, great. If I can get there on a plane in an hour, great. But if it’s going to be getting there on a plane, and then having to complete a complicated drive, it becomes less compelling. It’s about whether it is interesting and then how hard is it to get there.

How are hotels integrating retail into their guest experiences?

The luxury customer is looking for their hotel to curate and facilitate the entirety of their experience. It’s not only about the product, or the design of the hotel — it is about the surrounding services and amenities. So, if we can provide them access and opportunities that would otherwise be unavailable, for example, through pop-up shops, that bodes well for us. This is also beneficial to retailers, who are realising that our hotels provide access to an audience that has the propensity to buy and the discretionary means to do it, who are also in a state of mind to spend. Retail and fashion, and our business, can be quite complementary.

For example, our Ritz-Carlton in Montréal launched an exclusive pop-up boutique with Christian Louboutin, which even included a limited edition Formula One capsule collection, which was perfect for those in town for the Canadian Grand Prix. We also had milliner Gigi Burris, who partnered with The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua, and spent time with the hotel’s Hawaiian cultural advisor, in order to create an exclusive collection of six pieces that paid homage to different elements of the resort and destination.

We want to make sure that the collaborations fit the retailer, the fashion house, and the hotel brand — so for the guest or consumer it feels like an integrated experience. We’re loving the way these types of collaboration can enhance the guest experience, and I think there are many more opportunities here.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by Marriott International as part of a BoF partnership.

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The Trend Research Toolkit

by Gozde Goncu-Berk, Ph.D., University of California, Davis

Introduction

Economic, social, political and cultural contexts or the zeitgeist are impacting trends across industries and demographics or market segments as the boundaries of traditional consumer segmentations and traditional markets are blurring. For instance, female and male interests and behaviours are merging; and scientific developments in nanotechnology are affecting fashion and architecture industries at the same time. Therefore, forecasting fashion trends requires a thorough assessment of the long-term direction of the society and its implications across multiple industries as the first step. Once an emerging megatrend across industries is identified, the next step is to focus on the meaning of that trend for consumers in the context of the fashion industry and to determine the applications of that trend in competition and in industry specific shows and publications. Finally, this data is interpreted and synthesized into product attributes such as function, style, color, materials and textures for future seasons.

Fusion of objective and subjective skills is needed for forecasting future trends. Objective and analytical skills are required for systematic data sourcing, data analysis and interpretation. Trend forecasters should also have more subjective and artistic skills and characteristics such as awareness and intuition to sense newly emerging directions and to make predictions about their future implications. These subjective skills do not come from birth or appear suddenly rather they are built over time based on collection of experiences such as methodological research and constant information flow from networks. Thus, forecasting trends requires using rational research and a well-established network to predict where, when and why new things happen.

This chapter will introduce methods of conducting desk research and building an online trend network to ensure up-to-date constant information flow as well as formal methods of conducting research in the field to gather original data about specifics of a trend.

Desk Research

Step 1: Megatrends and Trend Drivers

• To determine an emerging megatrend across industries
• To determine potential innovators and early adopters of this trend
• To determine target population of consumers for in-depth field research
• To determine experts/knowledgeable professionals for in-depth field research

Websites, Social Media, Blogs, Magazines, Newspapers, Periodicals, TV programs, Radio Shows

Building an Online Trend Network

The first step of forecasting fashion trends starts with desk research where trend forecasters scan and review emerging socio-cultural shifts in economics, politics, science and technology, arts, entertainment and new ideas across industries in online and offline platforms. Although this process is described in a step-by-step manner, this scanning phase is an on-going process where forecasters constantly look for “the new”.

Gazing across online and offline media to detect and track changes in the way people live can highlight megatrends which can be observed in multiple industries, while identifying potential adopters of the megatrend and professionals knowledgeable about the megatrend. Forecasters use different terms such as cross-cultural analysis and cultural brailing to define this process of building insights about a megatrend affecting people on many scales.

Cross-cultural analysis involves scanning across industries to detect traces of emerging threads of commonality. Three-times rule can be used to prove credibility of an emerging trend when conducting this type of a scan. Three times rule is spotting three applications or examples of a trend with noticeable characteristics in three unrelated industries (Raymond, 2010). For example, let’s say you have identified three products with common characteristics pertaining to a trend, then you need to detect three examples of the same trend in three other industries which could be anything from retail, interiors, automotive, product design, beauty, technology, food, packaging or others. If common trends are found, these may constitute a mega-trend. Using three-times rule while conducting your desk research helps you validate your preliminary insights about an emerging megatrend.

Cultural Brailing is a term popularized by influential American trend forecaster Faith Popcorn and her trend forecasting agency “BrainReserve”. It can be defined as being open to anything new with all your senses wherever you are and whomever you are with. Susan Choi, Trend Track director at BrainReserve describes this process:

“Brailling is a way of communicating language through bumps on a page. We take that same technique here and feel the bumps in culture. The bumps are everything. Again it is about using all of your senses: things that you see, things that you taste, things that you hear. For example, it could be a matter of walking into a retail store and noticing the lighting, the music, feeling the different textures, just fully immersing yourself into whatever environment that you are in”

Whether the method you are using is cross-cultural analysis, cultural brailing or another one, according to Raymond (2010) asking the following questions helps while reviewing online and offline resources in order to build accurate insight about a possible megatrend.

Who – Who started the trend? Who are innovators and potential early adopters? What – What would you name the trend?

Where – Where is the physical or virtual space the trend emerges?

Why – Why is the trend emerging now?

When – When was the trend first noted?

Building Trend Network

As a result of the Internet, there is a tremendous amount of already existing research that can guide the trend forecasting process. As a result of the Internet, there is a tremendous amount of already existing research that can guide the trend forecasting process. Some of this information is paid for and some of it is freely available. When we consider the number of online daily newspapers and magazines, blogs, social media and websites dedicated to sharing new ideas, the amount of readily available data can be overwhelming. The first step in managing this amount of data to establish a library of favoured information sources and build an online information network, called a trend network. Such an online trend network can help you scan new ideas, products, services, cultural shifts on a regular basis.

Fashion trends do not take place in a vacuum independent from other industries (i.e. architecture, interior design, product design, food, entertainment, cosmetics and so on). All industries respond to major cultural shifts, the Zeitgeist or the spirit of times. Therefore, it is vital not to limit yourself to the fashion industry or build a network composed of only similar interest groups. People who share similar interests generally know similar things so the more diverse your network is the greater is the diversity of ideas you can reach.

Covering a wide range of online research sources builds a diverse trend network that will result in a need for a system to store, record and access material. One way to manage a library of online daily information flow is using online services like myalltop.com , delicious.com or google bookmarks where you can create a personal and online magazine rack of your favourite blogs and websites.

Collaborative Websites That Scan New Trends Globally

Today, most of the trend spotting websites benefit from crowdsourcing to detect emerging trends. Crowdsourcing is obtaining ideas and content from a large group of online community. Many websites benefit from communities around the world who help to spot new and hot ideas and happenings in their localities. Instead of relying on what a guru trendsetter states, these websites build a collaborative hive where thousands of people all over the world share new concepts they have spotted. The information sent by spotters is usually reviewed by an editorial team and then published in a blog format, often as free daily, weekly or monthly newsletters.

Springwise.com publishes new business ideas, technologies and products from wide range of industries on a daily basis as well as free daily and weekly newsletters.

Trendwatching.com is based in the Netherlands and publishes free monthly trend briefings where they address a megatrend with product and business examples from variety of industries around the world. The website offers a free tool called “consumer trend canvas” that can be used to analyze any detected trend in depth.

Trendhunter.com crowdsources new ideas about fashion, technology, design, business and culture publishing yearly trend reports specific to each industry. The website allows you to filter trends for each industry and also lists top twenty trends of the day, week and month. Interviews with influential professionals and articles about trends are also available.

Jwtintelligence.com publishes trend research and analysis across industries and geographies as well as in depth yearly trend reports.

Trendoriginal.com publishes new ideas in a categorized format such as lifestyle, fashion, tech, science and also offers user-generated directory which maps out the best trend spotting blogs.

PSFK.com is a content network that leverages its broad community and research methodology to create inspiring editorials, videos and events for their readers.

NOTCOT Inc is defined as a network of design sites including notcot.com and innovative community contributed sites notcot.org and notcouture.com . notcot.com visually displays editorial ideas and products in fashion, design, technology, home décor, food and drink while notcot.org displays ideas submitted by trend spotters. notcouture.com is solely focused on latest fashion and beauty for women and men.

Cassandra Daily or trendcentral.com is a free daily email newsletter and web site featuring relevant lifestyle, fashion, entertainment and technology trends and social happenings of the day using research, and insights of the global trendsetter network of The Intelligence Group.

CoolBusinessIdeas.com based in Singapore shares editorial and informer/trendspotter submitted ideas on emerging trends and new innovations at global and local scales. They cover wide range of topics from fashion and design to music, automobiles, retailing and health and beauty. It offers a free weekly newsletter.

Websites and Online Magazines

Coolhunting.com covers innovations in design, technology, style, culture, food and travel in a categorized format as well as weekly videos and interviews.

DavidReport.com is an online magazine and a blog that explores everything from art, architecture, culture, design and fashion to food, innovation, music, sustainability and travel. trendtablet.com is a free social media platform designed and curated by Lidewij Edelkoort where you can see examples of her recent works for clients

trendland.com is a highly visual online magazine covering new ideas in fashion, design, lifestyle, music, art and architecture.

refinery29.com is an independent fashion and style website in the United States covering everything from shopping and beauty to wellness and celebrities.

Trend Forecasting Agencies

Trend forecasting is a very cyclical and on-going process that requires constant research and analysis of new ideas and socio-cultural happenings. Trend forecasting is a very cyclical and on-going process that requires constant research and analysis of new ideas and socio-cultural happenings. Therefore, it takes a lot of time, effort and money investment to forecast trends and many companies fully and partially outsource this type of research and analysis. There are many professional trend-forecasting agencies operating at many different levels. For example, World Future Society and Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies systematically analyse future trends that will shape humanity. Studio Edelkoort and BrainReserve are companies by two leading global trend spotters Li Edelkoort and Faith Popcorn that operate at macro level and offer trend forecasting services to many different industries. On the other hand, companies like WGSN and Stylesight solely focus on the fashion industry. These companies have staff travelling around the world looking at street fashions and lifestyles, monitoring all sort of online and offline sources to identify the new and the next. Fashion forecasting agencies visit trade shows for colors and textiles and scan fashion merchandise around the globe as well as attending designers shows during fashion weeks. Trend forecasting agencies charge large sums of money for their knowledge. While some forecasting agencies share parts of their information online, full access to their projective reports requires membership.

Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (http://www.cifs.dk/en/) identify and analyze trends that influence the future based on statistical analysis and research of interdisciplinary staff from economics, political science, ethnography, psychology, engineering, PR and sociology. Most of the content requires membership.

The World Future Society (wfs.org) investigates how social, economic and technological developments are shaping the future.

StudioEdelkoort (edelkoort.com) , headed by Lidewij Edellcoort, a world-wide known trend guru, offers consultation on trends and product identity to wide range of industries from automobiles and high tech to home environments and fashion. The firm publishes limited quantity trend books targeting fashion, interior and cosmetic. Edelkoort creates audiovisual presentations about upcoming trends twice a year and gives seminars around the world.

BrainReserve (faithpopcorn.com) , led by famous American futurist Faith Popcorn, offers predictions of megatrends that will shape society. The company provides consultation at many levels with publications, seminars and future focused discussions.

WGSN (wgsn.com) was launched in 1998 as a trend forecasting service for the fashion industry and today employs over 300 editorial and design staff in offices throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America, and the Middle East. WGSN provides seasonal coverage and analysis on key looks, colors, and fabrics from all significant fashion week shows and offers specialized insight ranging from denim and intimates to kids wear and footwear to an international clientele such as Marks&Spencer and Target. The company partners with Vogue magazine to offer a digitized repository of every issue of American Vogue since 1892 as well as with the technology company Lectra for a starter pack filled with sketches, patterns and prints to create 3D virtual prototypes.

stylesight.com founded in 2003, has over 3,000 subscribing companies and 40,000+ individual users. The company offers forecasting and trend analysis and a large image library to a clientele from diverse industries such as eBay, Zara, Avon, The North Face and others.

Trendstop.com , Trendbuero.de , Japanconsuming.com are other agencies that offer localized and global trend forecasting services for their clients.

Social Media

The more people you are involved with, the more interesting ideas you are likely to receive. There are many social media platforms that can be utilized for trend forecasting research. When you consider the amount of information that runs in these networks, the number of people you need to be involved with may be overwhelming. Taking advantage of social media for trend forecasting research requires managing it carefully for effective use of time and effort. According to Vanston (2011) a first step in managing social network is selecting the general area of interest to receive new information. The areas of interest should be broad enough to uncover promising ideas but narrow enough to prevent the need for excessive effort. Next steps are to identify subject-matter experts who can provide new insights and then engage and maintain relationship with these people.

Facebook and Twitter can be especially useful to follow experts, influential people, companies and organizations on a regular basis. Pinterest is a significant social media channel where millions of consumers are interacting with millions of websites on a daily basis extracting ideas from the web and sharing them with others. Pinterest is not only useful to build a social network for receiving ideas but also to store and organize the visual information. Instagram is another web based social media platform where original photos are shared on a daily basis. Instagram especially resonates with Millennial consumers more than any other age bracket and thus can be effectively utilized to receive up-to-date visual information on their lifestyles. Tumblr is a microblogging platform. It is used to post short texts, photos, quotes, links, music and videos. Having a Tumblr account is like having a Web page. Users can customize its appearance with themes and get their own URLs that anyone can access online.

All of the websites, blogs and companies listed in this chapter including the ones that require subscription publish from one or several types of social media. Using social media to follow new ideas from a selected set of companies is a useful way of being up-to-date and conducting continuous desk research.

A blog is a personal website where an individual records personal opinions on a regular basis. Fashion blogs can be split into two main categories; independent blogs which are personal postings of an individual or group of people and corporate blogs which are run by a magazine, brand or a store (Rocamora, 2013). Lately, fashion blogs have gained mainstream presence and influence in the fashion industry. Independent fashion bloggers get invitations to fashion events, sell advertisement space to fashion retailers on their blogs, review and promote fashion products. There are numerous fashion blogs that are dedicated to sharing new trends, ideas and street fashions in trend forward places around the world. Google Blog Search is a tool used to search for blogs and blogposts.

thesartorialist.com was launched in 2005 by Scott Schuman who was listed as Time magazine’s Top 100 Design Influencers. He captures street styles throughout New York and Europe as well as fashion shows. Similar blogs for street fashion around the world: streetpeeper.com , facehunter.com , stockholmstreetstyle.com .

thestylerookie.com was started in 2008 by 11 year-old Tavi Gavinson who received a lot of publicity when her blog on teen style became very popular. She was invited to fashion weeks to give talks and style looks for well-known companies.

A few of the popular personal style blogs on women and men’s fashion are themanrepeller.com , theblondesalad.com , cupcakesandcashmere.com , fashiontoast.com , and bryanboy.com .

Other Online Tools

Google zeitgeist reveals the spirit of times by aggregating millions of search queries received every day. Google statistically displays searches done during one year and shows the top ten searches of the year as the current worldwide Zeitgeist.

Google Trends is another statistical tool that can be very helpful when researching megatrends across industries. You can search a specific term and see how many times it has been researched over time. You can specify it according to a country, according to a city. It gives a statistical display of what’s popular and what people are interested in currently.

You can set up Google alerts to monitor a query of your interest. Then, google alerts searches the web such as web pages, news, blogs that match new results for the query. When there are new results, google alerts sends them to you in an email format. Your query can be a topic as wide as fashion or very focused, such as customized footwear.

Offline Media

Although there are many online tools that help you research and store ideas and inspirations of future trends, it is still very important to do it in the traditional way. Following news from physical newspapers and magazines, reading books, following influential TV shows and radio shows are still effective means to understand the spirit of times.

Having a physical trend notebook for documenting your ideas and research is a very useful tool. You may not be online when you have an immediate idea or when you see or read something interesting. You can use a robust notebook and keep it with you at all times to sketch ideas, take notes, make diagrams, attach images and materials, fabrics and trims. Trend notebooks do not have rules set in stone; it is a completely personal tool, almost like a personal diary of the new things you have detected.

Gathering data from different online and offline resources and networks will give you insight about what is new and hot; however it is not enough to predict future trends. You will need to start analyzing this data in order for it to make sense and carry you to the next stage of field research.

As stated earlier, using the three times rules validates that you have identified a credible megatrend. While scanning online and offline media first determine the three examples of the megatrend in the fashion industry and three more examples of the same megatrend in three additional industries.

Next, you will need to identify innovators and early adopters of this trend to be able to focus your research on a specific target population during the field research stage. Based on your desk research so far, you can create a list of demographic, geographic and psychographic characteristics of innovators and early adopters of this megatrend. Demographics are about characteristics such as age, sex, income, marital status, family size, education, religion, race, and nationality; Geographics are about where people live, including information about which country, state, city, and the population in each area. Psychographics are about attitudes, tastes, values, and fears of people.

During desk research you will also develop a list of repeating expert names about the megatrend. These experts are knowledgeable professionals who can provide in-depth knowledge or coherent insights about the megatrend. The experts can be academicians, industry professionals like marketers, designers, retailers, journalists, economists, editors, and psychologists.

Field Research

Step 2: Industry Specific Trends

• To focus on the specifics of a megatrend in the context of fashion industry
• To develop an in depth understanding of the target consumer population
• To develop an understanding about the state of trend in the marketplace and competition
• People (innovators, early adopters, experts)
• Environments (streets, malls, stores, campuses, bazaars, concerts, theaters, bars, pubs,…)
• Observation

Competitive Research

When an emerging mega trend is identified with desk research, the next step is to deep dive and focus on the specifics of this trend by researching its potential impact on consumers for a specific industry. For example, the ageing population is a megatrend and there may be less obvious industry specific trends within this trend such as new materials and sizing system in clothing that is are sensible and aesthetically pleasing to older adults. Field research with consumers and experts related to the identified mega trend can yield valuable original data.

Even though disciplines like fashion, design, retail, marketing or journalism may seem quite diverse, one common factor among these disciplines is that the person is at the center of the profession. Understanding the human component is a vital part of understanding the impact and importance of a trend within a business sector. Today, there is a need for deeper collaboration between creators and individuals. Individuals think of themselves as active participants in the creation process rather than as consumers, customers or users of products. Thus, understanding behavioural and attitudinal needs, expectations and aspirations of individuals in the context of a megatrend are crucial to forecast industry specific trends and develop new products.

It is not a very straightforward task to understand people and especially what people will want in the future. Therefore, conducting field research is much more ambiguous than desk research. For example, if you ask people what type of garments they would like to wear next season, they probably will tell you the things they see around them. It won’t lead to anything new but only a repetition of what is already available. It is your job to discover the unarticulated aspirations, discover the needs people themselves probably are not aware of. You will need to work like a lifestyle detective and your tool in doing this is field research with methods of observation, interview and survey. You will extract knowledge first by observing what people do and asking and then listening to what they say.

Observation: Sensing vs. Looking

Trends have social, cultural or lifestyle aspects that can be observed more effectively than be articulated or described. Observation is seeing and understanding the world through images and then articulating this understanding with words. Like cultural brailing, observation is a transformative experience and requires immersing ourselves with all senses to see, listen and feel the new things and form impressions. Observation also requires freeing ourselves from the biases and prejudices we hold toward people and things.

Observation promotes feeling, thinking and responding toward something without passing judgment, as opposed to simply passively looking at something. When all we do is to look at something, meaning is lost. We look at the screen of our phone or we only look at the penny we use every day. We don’t consider the context beyond this simple act. This also applies to most of the objects we see around us. If asked to draw a quick sketch of a bicycle, you would probably have a hard time remembering all the details. When we look at something, although our mind may be active, we are not fully engaged in creating and embedding every detail to memory. On the other hand seeing something means to “understand” it in a deeper way. The combination of seeing something and understanding at a level at which you can identify all the details is really needed to observe something.

When we observe something, we not only see the big picture but we also see all the elements that unite to create it. As the observer we should be able to briefly take ourselves out of the story, and see the patterns we miss when we are too close to the subject. So observing requires seeing the parts as well as the sum of the parts. Think of it as zooming in and zooming out, zooming in to see the details, to see the leaves and branches of the trees and zooming out to see the bigger picture, the forest as a whole.

There are two formal ways of conducting observations. Non-participant observation involves data collection by observing behavior without interacting with the people and the environment. In this method, the observer is quiet, watching and trying to understand people’s lives, behaviors and environment. Non-participant observation helps to develop a preliminary understanding of the cultural context. Participant observation data are collected by interacting with people and environments, thereby experiencing the phenomenon being studied. Observers actively experience and feel people’s way of life by shadowing them. There are two options in conducting participant observations. Covert observations are when the viewer blends in and identity as an observer is not revealed. The other is overt observations where you reveal your identity as the observer. The advantage of covert observation is people will behave naturally. However, it is open to many ethical concerns as you are covering your identity and actively engaging in an activity with people and not telling them that you are conducting an observation.

In conducting observation one rule of thumb is to never rely on memory, as it is very easy to forget details. It is best practice to get help from notebooks, pens and pencils, sketchbooks, cameras, video cameras and voice recorders. It is also a good idea not to rely on a single method to capture observations. You should use a combination of visual data in addition to notes. You should always physically take notes in addition to digital recording because while you take notes, you not only record what you see but also reflect on what you see. When taking notes it is very important to be descriptive about what you observe rather than to be prescriptive or judgmental. To be descriptive you need to use descriptive adjectives and nouns that help you visualize the thing you are describing. This not only helps to remember but also triggers subconscious insights and associations. For example, in describing a shoe as “a navy sneaker” is shallow and prescriptive. On the other hand, being more thoroughly descriptive can be: “Navy color ankle sneaker with large logo on the side, white thick sole and checkered print behind ankle.”

Trend forecasters tend to be very descriptive about their observations as they have the ability to remember great detail. Raymond (2010) describes several techniques to build a visual memory and recall things effectively when observing a person and an environment. When looking at what a person is wearing including jewelry and body adornments, you can note items by placing the person in north, east, south and west axis. Another way is systematically noting items from head down and from inner layers to outer layers. While observing an environment, you can place it in three by three grid and start noting down characteristics in a clockwise direction from top to bottom and left to right.

In addition to observing consumer behaviour, other environments for observing fashion trends are Fashion Weeks, Trade Shows, and street fashion in the world fashion capitals. Some of the influential trade shows for fashion include:

• Premiere Vision- Textile and fabric shows with around 700 weavers from 28 countries held in Paris and NY.
• Pitti Immagine Filati- Knitwear for men and women, held in Florence, Italy.
• Bread & Butter- Latest trends in street and urban wear, held in Berlin, Germany. Interstoff Asia- Textile and apparel show held in Hong Kong.

An interview can be described as a conversation with a purpose. Interviews are very useful tools for gathering information of an emerging trend from innovators and early adopters and also from experts. In situations where we can’t observe we have to ask people questions. For example, we cannot always observe thoughts, feelings and intentions. We cannot observe behaviors or things that took place in the past. Sometimes there may be private situations that preclude the presence of an observer. In these situations the interview method and asking questions will provide the best opportunity for information gathering.

The traditional methods of interviewing empower the interviewer, as he/she is the person in control of the discussion content and time spent. Interviewers should purposefully develop and plan their interview strategy to bring participants into the partnership and avoid researcher/respondent or the expert/novice perceptions (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998). As an interviewer you are not there to fulfill the task of collecting answers to a set of questions from the people, nor as the experts who are there to help the people and answer their questions. Host/guest perception of interviewee’s role is another obstacle in building rapport (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998). The presence of interviewers as strangers in the interviewee’s environment may result in the host role for the interviewee and the guest role for the interviewer. In this type of relationship participants may try to please the person conducting the interviews just to make them comfortable.

Building a relaxed rapport is the key for a successful interview. There should be a mutual relationship where both parties are equal, honest and open. A master/apprentice model works the best where master symbolizes the interviewee and apprentice symbolizes the interviewer (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1998). A master teaches in the context of doing and this way the implicit structure becomes apparent and visible to the apprentice. People usually are not aware of the reason for their actions as they are built based on years of experience, or they may have simply become habits. Showing and doing create a natural flow of conversation and each step of doing a certain task can remind the participant of other details and create new questions. Other ways of building rapport is are listening and empathizing, being quiet and letting the participant talk, using encouraging probes to trigger more stories and mirroring participants like nodding when they node or smiling when they smile.

Creating interview questions is the most important step of gathering rich data from your interviews. In asking questions descriptive questions are especially useful to start the conversation and keep a participant freely talking. Following are some useful examples for creating descriptive questions.

Descriptive Question Examples

• Could you describe a typical …?
• Could you tell me how you usually make…?
• Could you describe what happened …. from the moment ..until …?
• Could you show me …?
• Could you give me an example of …?
• Could you tell me about some experiences you have…?
• If …, what would you do/say/think?
• Imagine yourself ….what kinds of things/what would you…?

In asking questions, put forward your own idea by asking leading questions. An example of a leading question is, “ Do you follow the latest fashion trends ?” In a subtle way this raises the prospect that maybe you don’t seem like you follow fashion trends.

It is very important to avoid multiple questions in one question and questions where yes/no would be the response. Asking a question like “ do you like simplicity in fashion ?” is not going to reveal much other than yes or no.

Asking questions such as “What do you mean by that?” when something is not clear may contain a hidden judgmental component. Such a question may seem to mean you haven’t been clear; you haven’t adequately explained; you are hiding the true reasons for what you told me (Spadley, 1979). Instead of asking for meaning, it works best to ask for use such as: What are some other ways you could talk about…? Can you think you think of some other examples of…?

During interviews making repeated explanations and restating your goal help to put the conversation in context (Spradley, 1979). As I said earlier, I’m interested in finding out …. I want to understand …. from your point of view

Also during the interview you can select key phrases and terms used by participants and restate them. Restating in this manner reinforces what has been said by way of explanation. Restating demonstrates an interest in learning their language and culture. Restatement must be distinguished from reinterpreting, a process in which the interviewer states in different words what the participant said. Reinterpreting prompts interviewees to translate while restating prompts them to speak in their own ordinary, everyday language (Spradley, 1979).

People tend to summarize their experience by abstracting from a number of concrete experiences when they are asked to talk about them. It is human nature to provide a general impression instead of focusing on all the little details that formed that general impression. Using probes in addition to supportive and encouraging manners is a strategy to overcome abstraction and probe deeper (Chambers,1992). The use of Cultural probes is a technique for gathering inspirational data about the peoples, lives, values and thoughts (Gaver, Dunne & Pacenti, 1999).The probes are small packages that can include any sort of artifact (like a map, postcard, camera or diary) along with evocative tasks, which are given to participants to allow them to record specific events, feelings or interactions. For example you can ask people to keep diaries or record photos that capture a sense of their day or to remember a specific activity like dressing up or shopping; you can ask people to record places they visit for fashion shopping on a map; you can ask people to upload visuals or texts to a social networking site about favorites they own, things they aspire to, technology they use, daily life (shopping, home, work leisure). Then this information is used as a guide during the interviews and can be used to as a referral point to probe deeper. By sharing data this way, the information becomes public, both researcher and user can point out, manipulate and discuss the information.

Focus groups are basically group interviews where overlapping spread of knowledge is gained at once. They are useful to understand some sensitive topics that may be discussed in a group more easily than individually and to eliminate dominance of single voice. However, one very big disadvantage of focus groups is that participants influence each other. Participants may be affected by others’ ideas or they might be too intimidated to answer questions in a group. Focus groups are rarely successful where one person has the power card and is in charge of the whole process. For focus groups to be successful they should be done with mutual relaxed rapport, in an environment where people can freely navigate, share ideas, point out and show things.

During the interview process just like observation you should record data in physical and digital mediums. Note taking should be always supported with voice and/or video recording. Having multiple interviewees in the field can help you focus on the process better as one person can ask questions while another person can take notes and be in charge of video recording. But as the number of interviewees increases it can get more intimidating for participants; therefore it is very important to balance the number.

After the interviews are completed, type up the notes and transcribe the recordings. As a result you might validate your prior findings, develop new insights or discover new veins of research. Such discoveries may require online or face-to-face follow up interviews.

Once you have fully established a clear understating of your topic using interviews and observations then you may want to move onto quantitative research. Using surveys in addition to interviews and observations triangulates research results. Triangulation or cross-examination indicates that more than two methods are used in a study (Beebe, 1995). The idea is that a researcher can be more confident with a result if different methods lead to the same result.

You can gather statistical and numerical data with surveys while observations and interviews are qualitative in nature – promoting understanding of needs, aspirations, and limitations. Interviews and observations are about things that are hard to measure with numbers; surveys are mainly about things you can easily measure using a numerical scale. Surveys are helpful in identifying some general facts about people involved in the trend and for creating typologies. For example, you can gather generalizable data about demographics of the people, ages of the people in relation to adoption of the trends, percentage of male and female members in this target population, the income levels of the people, about their ethnicity, about the regions in which members of this group live, etc. It is also possible to gather data about psychographics by asking them how they value something using a scale. You can also compare participants across demographics, psychographics and geographics. When surveys are repeated over time as longitudinal surveys, it is possible to determine the status of a trend, whether it is at the beginning of an innovation curve or moving from innovators to mainstream.

Using surveys requires careful identification of target populations. Participants who are not part of the target population skew the data when they are surveyed (Raymond, 2011). For example, if you are doing a long-term trend forecasting abut children’s trends, then you probably want to target people who have children and exclude people who do not. How can you do this? You can use a screener or trick question that will help you determine those who are not part of the target population. A screener question is asked as the first question in the survey. It should be asked so that the respondent can’t guess the correct answer in order to proceed to the next question (Raymond,2011). For example, if you are working on active wear trends, you will want to exclude people who do not exercise with a screener question such as:

How many times do you exercise a week?

• I do not exercise
• Once a week
• Twice a week
• Three times a week
• More than three times a week

In this case, a person who answers, “I do not exercise” can be excluded from the sample.

Developing survey questions that will lead to meaningful data requires very careful planning and understanding of the types of questions you can ask and types of answers they can reveal. A trial or pilot test with a small sample can help you determine if you are getting the responses you want.

Demographic Questions Demographic information describes a person. Demographic questions ask about age, gender, occupation, education, family, nationality, income, and such. These types of questions help you compare results across categories. For example, you can compare answers of female and male respondents.

Behavioral Questions These questions are about how a person behaves and about certain actions.

How many pairs of jeans have you purchased in the last three months? Or In the last three months I bought

• one pair of blue jeans
• more than two pairs of blue jeans
• no blue jeans

Attitudinal Questions These questions are about how a person thinks and feels about something rather than what a person does.

On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you feel about simplicity in fashion? 1- Very dissatisfied 2-Dissatisfied 3-Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied Satisfied 4- Satisfied 5-Very satisfied

There are different ways of asking demographic, behavioral and attitudinal questions. You can ask participants to choose from a set of answers, you can ask them to order things, or you can have them use a scale to determine their position on a particular subject.

Multiple Choice The multiple-choice question consists of three or more mutually exclusive answers. These types of questions are widely used for demographic and behavioral questions:

What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? No schooling completed High school degree College degree Graduate degree

Rank Order Rank order questions allow ranking based upon a specific attribute or characteristic. You can also use images of products and compare products, tastes, aesthetics preferences or mainstream and emerging trends. These questions are especially useful for developing attitudinal survey questions.

Please rank the following brands according to their aesthetic appeal. Place a “1” next to the brand that is most aesthetically pleasing to you and so on. __ GAP __ Abercrombie __ H&M __ Urban outfitters

Rating Scale A rating scale question requires a person to rate something along a well-defined, evenly spaced continuum. Rating scales are often used to measure the direction and intensity of attitudes so it is good for attitudinal survey questions.

Which of the following categories best describes your last experience …? –Very pleasant –Somewhat pleasant –Neither pleasant nor unpleasant –Somewhat unpleasant –Very unpleasant

The Semantic Differential Scale (Likert Scale) You can ask a participant to choose where his or her position lies on a scale between two bipolar adjectives. The semantic differential scale asks a person to rate a trend, product, brand, or company based upon a five-point or seven-point rating scale that has two bi-polar adjectives at each end. Unlike a rating scale it does not have a neutral middle option and a person is asked to evaluate things to an extent.

Would you say simplicity in fashion is: (5) Very Attractive (4) (3) (2) (1) Very Unattractive

Common rules applicable to all types of survey questions are avoiding yes/no questions similar to interviews and developing first response statement answers, which are more emotional and subjective.

There are many organizations and companies as well as governmental agencies that run surveys and build databases. Mori, Mintel, YouGov, Harris Research and Pew Global are a few of them. For these types of firms the number of people who should take the survey depends on the geographic area in which they operate, as it is proportional to the population. For example, 1000 is the minimum standard requirement for most European countries, while in the United States this can rise up to 10,000 in relation to over 300.000 population (Raymond,2011). How many participants should you have when you conduct surveys? The minimum number for statistical significance is 30. With at least 30 participants, you can generalize for those results.

In addition to conducting physical surveys there are free online tools like Surveymonkey.com or limesurvey.org for running online surveys. You can use social media and websites like Facebook to reach out to your target population to conduct your survey.

In analysing survey results, the first step is listing key findings. Survey results can show common threads but can also display anomalies and thus, you need to detect these anomalies. Once all the findings are listed, they should be analyzed in relation to findings from desk research and qualitative research (observation and interview). As stated earlier, one of the benefits of combining desk research and methods of field research is data triangulation. Data triangulation happens when a finding is verifiable with multiple research methods. This adds to your credibility and makes your findings and predictions about future trends stronger.

In addition to desk research and field research, competitive research monitors activities of competing companies with similar consumer bracket and product categories. Competitive research can identify competing companies’ offerings and predict their responses to future trends and market conditions. It offers potential benefits for understanding the market in which a company operates, improved targeting of consumers and finding niche consumer segments It is also highly beneficial in determining pricing strategies.

However, competitive research can sometimes be a dangerous tool as companies may replicate their competitor’s strategies. What is happening in the marketplace today is obvious to everyone and do not create new opportunities. Trend forecasting should be about finding out what’s going to be big and unique tomorrow while competitive research should be used as a tool to differentiate brands and products from those of competing companies in the context of future trends.

Fashion designers and merchandisers shop the marketplace locally and globally to benchmark and collect inspiration from innovative companies. Visiting competition first hand and experiencing competitor’s products and pricing as a consumer provide valuable insight for gaining an understanding of the marketplace and positioning trend forecasting efforts within the competition. Companies can purchase services such as Hoovers and Dun & Bradstreet that can provide detailed competitive analysis. They offer data about history, directors, consumers, employees and recent developments as well as their products and pricing.

Application Exercise

This process is intended to help you learn about identifying emerging mega trends through desk research

• Build a network composed of various interest groups (i.e. architecture, interior design, product design, food, entertainment, cosmetics…)
• Subscribe to newsletters of collaborative trend research/forecast websites (i.e. springwise.com, trendwatching.com…)
• Follow experts, influential people and professionals related to trend forecasting in social media
• Subscribe to personal blogs on trend forecasting
• Research through the online network you have built to detect repeating patterns/ ideas for an emerging trend. Expect your research to be very open at the beginning. It will get more and more focused as you proceed and start seeing patterns. As you research, create a visual and textual library that outlines the emerging trends you have tracked. Start grouping links, images and texts about repeating patterns/ideas.
• What are the common characteristics you have detected across various industries related to the emerging trend?
• Who are experts/knowledgeable people related to it?
• Who are potential target population for this emerging trend?
• Name an emerging trend of your choice and write a concise trend thesis defining its major characteristics.

Beebe, J. (1995). Basic concepts and techniques of rapid appraisal. Human Organization, 54(1), 42-51.

Beyer, H., & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Brown, T. (2009). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: Harper Business.

Chambers, R. (1992). Rural appraisal: Rapid, relaxed and participatory. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.

Gaver, W., Dunne, T., Pacenti, E. (1999). Cultural Probes. ACM Interactions. 6(1), 21-29.

Hampden-Turner, C., & Trompenaars, F. (1997). Riding the waves of culture: Understanding diversity in global business. London: N. Brealey.

Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: Work is theatre & every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Raymond, M. (2011). The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook, London: Lauren King.

Rocamora , A. (2013). Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-portraits, Fashion Theory, 15 (4), 407–424

Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview, Holt, Rinehart and Winston‬.

Toffler, A. (1981). The third wave. New York: Bantam Books.

Vanston, J.H., & Vanston, C. (2011), Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit From Business & Technology Trends, Texas: Technology Futures

Communicating Fashion: Trend Research and Forecasting Copyright © by kjensen. All Rights Reserved.

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The world in dress: Anthropological perspectives on clothing, fashion, and culture

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Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Clothing research has attracted renewed interest in anthropology over the past two decades, experiencing a florescence that had been kept within bounds by reigning theoretical paradigms. The works have been influenced by general explanatory shifts in anthropology, which inform disparate bodies of clothing research that otherwise have little unity. The most noticeable trend is a preoccupation with agency, practice, and performance that considers the dressed body as both subject in, and object of, dress practice. The turn to consumption as a site and process of meaning making is evident also in clothing research. Dress has been analyzed, by and large, as representing something else rather than something in its own right, although new efforts to reengage materiality suggest that this approach is changing. Little work has been done on clothing production issues, though some scholars examine the significance of dress in the context of the entire economic circuit and the unequal relationships between its actors.

• Clothing practice
• Consumption
• Dressed body
• Material culture
• Style diversification

ASJC Scopus subject areas

• Cultural Studies
• Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

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• dresses Arts and Humanities 100%
• Culture Arts and Humanities 100%
• Perspective Arts and Humanities 100%
• Fashion Arts and Humanities 100%
• Clothing Arts and Humanities 100%
• clothing INIS 100%
• Labour Arts and Humanities 50%
• anthropology INIS 40%

T1 - The world in dress

T2 - Anthropological perspectives on clothing, fashion, and culture

AU - Hansen, Karen Tranberg

N2 - Clothing research has attracted renewed interest in anthropology over the past two decades, experiencing a florescence that had been kept within bounds by reigning theoretical paradigms. The works have been influenced by general explanatory shifts in anthropology, which inform disparate bodies of clothing research that otherwise have little unity. The most noticeable trend is a preoccupation with agency, practice, and performance that considers the dressed body as both subject in, and object of, dress practice. The turn to consumption as a site and process of meaning making is evident also in clothing research. Dress has been analyzed, by and large, as representing something else rather than something in its own right, although new efforts to reengage materiality suggest that this approach is changing. Little work has been done on clothing production issues, though some scholars examine the significance of dress in the context of the entire economic circuit and the unequal relationships between its actors.

AB - Clothing research has attracted renewed interest in anthropology over the past two decades, experiencing a florescence that had been kept within bounds by reigning theoretical paradigms. The works have been influenced by general explanatory shifts in anthropology, which inform disparate bodies of clothing research that otherwise have little unity. The most noticeable trend is a preoccupation with agency, practice, and performance that considers the dressed body as both subject in, and object of, dress practice. The turn to consumption as a site and process of meaning making is evident also in clothing research. Dress has been analyzed, by and large, as representing something else rather than something in its own right, although new efforts to reengage materiality suggest that this approach is changing. Little work has been done on clothing production issues, though some scholars examine the significance of dress in the context of the entire economic circuit and the unequal relationships between its actors.

KW - Clothing practice

KW - Consumption

KW - Dressed body

KW - Material culture

KW - Style diversification

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=9144266355&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=9144266355&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143805

DO - 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143805

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:9144266355

SN - 0084-6570

JO - Annual Review of Anthropology

JF - Annual Review of Anthropology

International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research

• Open access
• Published: 25 December 2022

Evaluation and trend of fashion design research: visualization analysis based on CiteSpace

• Yixin Zou   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1880-6382 1 ,
• Sarawuth Pintong 2 ,
• Tao Shen 3 &
• Ding-Bang Luh 1  

Fashion and Textiles volume  9 , Article number:  45 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

9021 Accesses

4 Citations

Metrics details

Fashion or apparel refers to a topic discussed publicly as an indispensable discipline on a day-to-day basis, which has aroused rising attention from academic sessions over the past two decades. However, since the topic of fashion design covers knowledge in extensive ranges and considerable information, scholars have not fully grasped the research field of fashion design, and the research lacks directional guidance. To gain more insights into the existing research status and fronts in the fashion design field, this study conducts a quantitative literature analysis. The research of this study is conducted by employing CiteSpace technology to visualize and analyze 1388 articles regarding “fashion design” in the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection. To be specific, the visualization and the analysis concentrate on the annual number of articles, author collaboration, institutional collaboration, literature citations, keywords clustering, and research trend evolution of the mentioned articles. As highlighted by this study, the effect of the US and the UK on academic research in fashion design is relatively stronger and extensive. Sustainable fashion refers to the research topic having aroused more attention since 2010, while new research topics over the past few years consist of “wearable fashion”, “transgender fashion” and “medical fashion”. The overall research trend of fashion design is developing as interdisciplinary cross research. This study systematically reviews the relevant literature, classifies the existing research status, research hotspots and frontier trends in the academic field of “fashion design”, and presents the knowledge map and information of literature for researchers in relevant fields.

Introduction

In academic research and writing, researchers should constantly search relevant literature to gain systematic insights into the subject area (e.g., the major research questions in the field, the seminal studies, the landmark studies, the most critical theories, methods and techniques, as well as the most serious current challenges). The process to answer the mentioned questions refers to an abstract process, which requires constant analysis, deduction and generalization. Any literature emerging over time may be critical, any research perspective may cause novel inspiration, and any detail can be the beginning of the subsequent research. However, when literature is being sorted and analyzed, if judgment only complies with personal experience, important literature will be inevitably missed, or the research direction will be lost in the research. For the process of conducting literature analysis, Hoover proposed that the quantitative methods of literature represent elements or features of literary texts numerically, applying effective, accurate and widely accepted mathematical methods to measure, classify and analyze literature quantitatively (Hoover, 2013 ). On this basis, literary data and information are more comprehensively processed. Prof. Chaomei Chen developed CiteSpace to collect, analyze, deliver and visualize literature information by creating images, diagrams or animations, thereby helping develop scientific knowledge maps and data mining of scientific literature. Knowledge visualization primarily aims to detect and monitor the existing state of research and research evolution in a knowledge field. Knowledge visualization has been exploited to explore trends in fields (e.g., medical, management science, biomedicine and biotechnology).

However, the international research situation in fashion design has not been analyzed by scholars thus far. Fashion, a category of discourse, has been arousing scholars’ attention since the late nineteenth century (Kim, 1998 ). In such an era, fashion is recognized by individuals of all classes and cultures, and it is publicly perceived. The field of fashion design is significantly correlated with people's lives (Boodro, 1990 ), and numerous nations and universities have long developed courses regarding fashion design or fashion. Besides, the development of fashion acts as a symbol of the soft power of the country. The discussion on fashion trend, fashion designer, fashion brands, artwork and other topics in the society turns out to be the hotspot discussed on a nearly day-to-day basis, and the discussion in the society even exceeds the academic research. However, the academic research of fashion design refers to a topic that cannot be ignored. The accumulation and achievements of academic research are manifested as precipitation of knowledge for developing the existing fashion field, while significantly guiding future generations. Studying the publishing situation and information in fashion design will help fashion practitioners or researchers classify their knowledge and provide them with novel inspiration or research and literature directions.

This study complies with the method of quantitative literature analysis, and CiteSpace software is adopted to analyze the literature in fashion design. Through searching web of science (WOS) Core Collection, 1388 articles regarding “fashion design” are retained. Co-citation, co-authoring and co-occurrence analysis refer to the major functions of CiteSpace. This study analyzes the articles regarding “fashion design”, and the focus is placed on the annual publication volume, author collaboration, institutional collaboration, national collaboration, literature citations, keyword co-occurrence, keyword clustering, and the research evolution, and visualized the literature and research as figures of these articles. The results here are presented as figures. This study provides the fronts knowledge, the current research status research, the hotspots and trends in fashion design research.

In this study, CiteSpace technology is adopted to analyze all collected literature data. CiteSpace, developed by Professor Chaomei Chen, an internationally renowned expert in information visualization at Drexel University, USA (Wang & Lu, 2020 ), refers to a Java application to visually analyze literature and co-citation networks (Chen, 2004 ). CiteSpace is capable of displaying burst detection, mediated centrality and heterogeneous networks regarding literate information. Visual analysis of the literature by using CiteSpace covers three functions, i.e., to identify the nature of specialized research frontiers, to label and cluster specialized research areas, as well as to identify the research trends and abrupt changes based on the data derived from the analysis. CiteSpace provides a valuable, timely, reproducible and flexible method to track the development of research trends and identify vital evidence (Chen et al., 2012 ).

To analyze the existing status of research and publications on the topic of “fashion design” in academia and different nations, the “Web of Science” (WOS) database is adopted as the data collection source here. Web of Science provides seamless access to existing and multidisciplinary information from approximately 8700 of the most extensively researched, prestigious and high-impact research journals worldwide, covering Science Citation Index (SCI) Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), as well as Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) (Wouters 2006 ). Its vital feature is that it covers all article types, e.g., author information, institutional addresses, citations and References (Wouters 2006 ). Research trends and publications in specific industry areas can be effectively analyzed.

To be specific, the “Web of Science Core Collection” database is selected in Web of Science and the indexing range includes SCI, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, BKCI-S, BKCI-SSH, ESCI databases. This step aims to expand the search scope of journals and search a maximal amount of relevant literature. A “subject search” is adopted, covering the search title, the abstract, the author and the keywords. There have been other areas of research on clothing or textiles (e.g., textile engineering and other scientific research areas). However, in this study, to ensure that the topic of analysis is relevant, the subject search is conducted by entering “fashion design” or “Costume design” clothing design”, or “Apparel design”, and only academic research regarding fashion design is analyzed. To ensure the academic nature of the collected data, the search scope here is the “article” type. The time frame was chosen from 2000 to 2021 to analyze the publications on “fashion design” for past 21 years. After this operation, the results of the search were filtered two times. The search was conducted until September 23, 2021, and 1388 articles were retained on the whole.

All bibliographic information on the pages was exported into text format and subsequently analyzed with CiteSpace software. Retrieved publications were filtered and copies were removed in CiteSpace to ensure that the respective article is unique and unduplicated in the database. 1388 articles filtered down from 2000 to 2021 were analyzed in all time slices of 1 year, and most of the cited or TOP 50 of the respective item were selected from each slice.

Results and Discussion

Publications in the last 21 years.

The publication situation of WOS database with “fashion design” as the theme from 2000 to 2021 shown in Fig.  1 . On the whole, the number of articles published on the theme of “fashion design” is rising from 2000 to 2007, the number of articles published each year is almost identical, and the number of articles published in 2008–2009 is slightly increasing. The second wave of growth is in 2011, with an increase about 60% compared with the number of publications in 2010, and it has been rising year by year. 2017 is the peak year with a high volume of 171 publications. 2018 shows another decline, whereas over 100 publications remain. 2018, 2019 and 2020 show continuous growths again. As of September 2021, the number of publications in 2021 is 77. Although the number of articles declines in 2018, the overall number of articles over the past 2 decades is still rising. The reason for the low number of publications around year of 2000 is that fashion as a category of discourse has aroused the attention of scholars from the late nineteenth century (Kim, 1998 ). The year-on-year increase is explained as research on fashion is arousing rising attention from scholars. The significant increase in research papers regarding “fashion design” in 2016 and 2017 is that around 2016, and the fashion industry has been impacted by technological developments. Moreover, the way in which design and clothing made has incorporated considerable technological tools (e.g., 3D printing and wearable technology).

Total publications and sum of times cited from 2000 to 2021 according to the web of science. Data updated to September 2021

Author co-authorship analysis

The knowledge map of cited authors based on publication references can present information regarding influential research groups and potential collaborators (Liang, Li, Zhao, et al., 2017 ). The function of co-authorship analysis is employed in CiteSpace to detect influential research groups and potential collaborators. Citespace can calculate the most productive authors in related fields. Table 1 shows that the most productive authors, which related with fashion design theme.

The author with the maximal number of publications is Olga Gurova from Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki (Finland). Her research area has focused on consumer nationalism and patriotism, identity politics and fashion, critical approach to sustainability and wearable technology and the future. Sustainable design has been a hotspot over the past decade and continues to be discussed today, and wearable technology has been a research hotpot in recent years. Olga Gurova is in first place, thereby suggesting the attention given to the mentioned topics and studies in society and fashion area. The second ranked author is Marilyn Delong from University of Minnesota (The USA). The research area consists of Aesthetics, Sustainable apparel design, History and Material Culture, Fashion Trends, Cross-cultural Influence on Design, as well as Socio-psychological aspects of Clothing. The author with the identical number of 7 publications is Kirsi Niinimäki from Aalto University (Finland). Her research directions consist of sustainable fashion and textiles, so her focus has been on the connection between design, manufacturing systems, business models and consumption habits.

For Caroline Kipp, her research area includes modern and contemporary textile arts, decorative arts and craft, craftivism, jacquard weaving, French kashmere shawls, as well as color field painting. For Nick Rees-Roberts, his research area includes fashion film, culture and digital media. Veronica Manlow from Brooklyn College in the Koppelman School of Business (USA.) The research field consists of creative process of fashion design, organizational culture and leadership in corporate fashion brands. Kevin Almond has made a contribution to creative Pattern Cutting, Clothing/Fashion Dichotomies, Sculptural Thinking in Fashion, Fashion as Masquerade. Hazel Clark, and his research field covers fashion theory and history, fashion in China, fashion and everyday life, fashion politics and sustainment. As revealed from the organization of the authors' work institutions and nations in the table, most of the nations with the maximal frequency of publications originate from the US, thereby revealing that the US significantly supports fashion design research. In general, the research scope covers fashion design, culture, mass media, craft, marketing, humanities, technology and etc. Based on the statistics of authorship collaboration, this study indicates that scholars from the US and Finland take up the top positions in the authorship publication ranking.

Moreover, Fig.  2 shows the academic collaborations among authors, which are generated by selecting the unit of analysis, setting the appropriate thresholds. The distance between the nodes and the thickness of the links denote the level of cooperation among authors (Chen & Liu, 2020 ). The influential scholars and the most active authors have not yet developed a linear relationship with each other, and collaborative networks have been lacked. It is therefore revealed that the respective researcher forms his or her own establishment in his or her own field, whereas seldom forms collaborative relationships. Thus, this study argues that to improve the breadth and depth of the field of fashion design research, the cooperation and connections between authors should be strengthened (e.g., organizing international collaborative workshops, joint publications and academic conferences) to up-regulate the amount of knowledge output and create more possibilities for fashion research.

Author collaboration network

Institution co-authorship analysis

The number of articles issued by the respective institution and the partnership network are listed in Table 2 .

Figure  3 shows the collaborative relationships among research institutions, while the distance between nodes and the thickness of links represents the level of collaborative institutions. The size of the nodes represents the number of papers published by the institutions, while the distance between the nodes and the thickness of the links indicates the level of cooperation between the institutions.

Co-relationships between nations in “fashion design” research

As indicated from the Table 2 , most of the top ten publishing institutions are from the UK and the US, and two universities in the UK rank first and second with more than 20 publications, and most of the institutions are from the UK, thereby demonstrating that the UK's achievements and effect in the field of fashion are far more than other nations. According to the cooperation network between institutions, there are 5 main cooperation networks. First, London College of Fashion, achieving the most number of articles, and there are 8 institutions cooperating with London College of Fashion, among which the closest cooperation is with Parsons Paris Sch Art & Design in the US, whose more influential areas of articles are consumers behavior, unisex clothing, third gender, communicating sustainability, real installation, Italian fashion system, global market, local culture, knitwear and textile design, international scenario, conventional craft methodologies, innovative potential, as well as 3D software application.

The second network of partnerships concentrates on University Arts London as the central node, with frequent collaborators (e.g., Center St Martins Coll Art & Design, Loughborough University Technology, Hut Grp, Sothebys Inst Art, Project Mobile Ising Sexual Hlth, De Montfort University, University of Southampton, Royal Soc Arts, Royal Coll Art). The more influential areas of publication are: electric corset, future histories, clothing sustainability, south Asian youth culture, textile patterning technique, hybrid functional clothing, UK fashion upcycling businesses, rematerializing crafting understanding, fashion designers apprentice, design ethnography approach, developing apparel design guideline and so on.

The third collaborative network is formed by Aalto University, DongHua University, University Southern Denmark, and other institutions, with more influential publications below: haring clothe; fashion designer; Chinese ethnic minority; design recipe; clothing carbohydrate binge; training design researcher; fashion design; traditional handicraft, etc.

The fourth cooperation network consists of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Ryerson University, Queensland University of Technology, Tsinghua University, York University, Art Comm China Fashion Associate, and other institutions. The influential publications areas are: Zhongshan suit; creative application; clothing design; Chinese male; medical moment; menswear design preference; cross-national study; aesthetic aspect; evaluative criteria; disease prevention.

The fifth network organized by University Minnesota Sch Design, Seoul Natl University, Cornell University, University Calif Davis, University North Carolina Greensboro, Colorado State University and others, with the influential research areas if sustainable apparel design practice, sustainable clothing, female users’ perspective, up-cycling design process; apparel design education; strategic ambiguity effective instructional tool, as well as apparel design.

It is noteworthy that: (1) although the University of Leeds has the maximal number of papers, it has not formed a collaborative network with the University of Leeds in the analysis of collaborative relationships; UK institutions have achieved prominent research results, but in the analysis of the number of author papers, and most of the authors with more papers originate from the US. In brief, British institutions, especially university institutions, generally achieve a high level of research, whereas there are fewer authors with a particularly high number of publications. (2) Asian culture covering South Asian youth culture and Chinese fashion culture appear 3 times in the research network as one of the important research areas that combine fashion and culture. (3) Moreover, the respective sub-network has exchanges and cooperation with universities or institutions from other nations, whereas the distance between the sub-networks is long. It indicates that the self-networks have not yet formed a unified network structure among each other, and are only active within their own groups. The issuing institutions that enter the top ten are nearly universities, which acts as the main power of academic articles punishment, and few other institutions (e.g., companies or social organizations). Accordingly, the cooperation between institutions should be boosted. It is necessary to exploit their strengths and advantages, expand the research field and research scope, and make more contributions to the research on “fashion design” topic.

Country co-authorship analysis

Table 3 lists the studies status on “fashion design” in different nations. The US has the maximal number of publications with 257 articles, followed by the UK with 226 articles.

Figure  4 shows the co-relationships between differently nations. The nodes in the Fig.  4 represent nations, and their sizes indicate the number of articles from different nations. The distance between the nodes and the thickness of the links represents the level of cooperation between nations. The purple rings of the purple nodes indicate high centrality, which means that the mentioned nodes are key points connecting different parts of the network. The thicker the purple ring, the higher the centrality of that node. With the U.S. as the centrality degree, it links France, Lebanon, Scotland, Nigeria, Italy, Ireland, South Korea, Thailand, England, the People’s Republic of China, Sweden, Turkey, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Australia, 17 nations in total. With the U.S. as the centrality degree, it links France, Italy, Brazil, Scotland, Denmark, Thailand, South Africa, Turkey, Australia, Sweden, Wales, the People’s Republic of China, North Ireland, Sweden, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Egypt, America, a total of 22 nations are linked. Although the previous information on the volume of publications by institutions shows that institutions in the UK nations are dominant. However, the total volume of publications compared, the US is higher than the UK, thereby demonstrating that some other institutions or organizations besides universities also contribute to the volume of publications. Furthermore, as revealed from the degree of crossover of the cooperation network in Fig.  5 , except for the UK and the US, there is but not close cooperation and connection between other nations, the nodes are far away, and the more prominent node centers are the US and the UK. This leads to the conclusion that nations should strengthen the intensity and density of cooperation and enhance their influence in fashion design research.

Linking relationships between nations

Cited references network among the literature

As indicated from the analysis of the previous network of authors, collaborating institutions and collaborating nations, the research results are more superior in the US and the UK. However, given the research statistics issued by WOW Travel in 2019, the top 10 influential nations in the field of fashion consist of the USA, the UK, Italy, France, Japan, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the People' Republic of China, including Korea. This phenomenon is likely to be attributed to the different language systems of nations other than the UK and the US, and that some of the mentioned nations have their own search databases for articles. For this reason, the publication data are not retrieved. Other nations should actively publish in English or international academic journals to expand their effect on the international research field, not only in fashion trends or arts work creation.

Co-scholar study based on cited references

The literature can be termed a knowledge base, as well as a source of knowledge and ideas. A novel research cannot be outputted without the contribution of knowledge from previous authors, as well as the insights into and mastery of the literature. Co-scholar analysis builds a literature co-citation network by selecting several representative studies as the object of analysis. Vital references in a specific research area can be detected, and a knowledge graph of cited authors by complying with published references can present information regarding influential research field and knowledge. Table 4 shows the most distribution of the references in fashion design theme. Figure  5 is an analysis of the highly cited literature network. Describe and summarize the high-cited literature based on the information in the two charts.

The node density is 0.00313 for cited reference network, thereby illustrating that fewer links and co-citations among the literature. For the citation status of the respective literature, the analysis begins with the work of Fletcher Kate, appearing more frequently in the table, Fletcher Kate’s 2016 book “ Craft of use: post-growth fashion ” pertains to label 0 “fashion system”. The book explores “craft of use”, using ingenious ideas and practices to make garments/fabrics present as an alternative, dynamic, experiential framework for articulating and promoting sustainability in the fashion world (Fletcher, 2016 ). Fletcher, 2012 and Fletcher and Tham, 2014 pertain to the identical cluster 6. Fletcher Kate’s 2012 “ Fashion Sustainability ” counting 12 times, with ranking No.1 in Table 4 . The book’s contents about fashion sustainability in three main parts, i.e., fashion products, fashion system, as well as fashion design practice (Fletcher, 2012 ). According to the graph, Fletcher Kate's book exhibits a high frequency in the citation network and overall citation. The book from Fletcher ( 2008 ) talking about sustainable fashion and clothing, which has the second maximal citation, frequency of 9. The book is primarily concerned with sustainable fashion and sustainable design. Routledge handbook of sustainability and fashion, published in 2014. The major contents focus on sustainability, and fashion recognizes the complexity of aligning fashion with sustainability. It explores fashion and sustainability at the levels of products, processes and paradigms, while employing a truly multi-disciplinary approach to critically question and suggest creative responses to issues, i.e., Fashion in a post-growth society, Fashion, diversity and equity, Fashion, fluidity and balance across natural, social and economic systems, social sciences, arts and humanities interested in sustainability and fashion (Fletcher and Tham, 2014 ). Fletcher Kate made prominent contributions to fashion sustainable design and sustainable development.

The third most frequently cited book is Manzini’s ( 2015 ) book " Design, When Everybody Designs ", with eight citations. It presents Design and social Innovation, Collaborative organizations and encounters, Design ways and Design for novel cultures (Manzini, 2015 ). The ideas of social innovation design and sustainable design are presented.

The journal of “You are what you wear: How plus-size fashion figures in fat identity formation” from Lauren Downing Peters, takes up the third place in terms of frequency of citations. The research regarding fat identities are formed through the intimate practices of self-fashioning and via social channels (e.g., shopping and fashion blogging), thereby bridging the fields of fat studies and fashion studies. It also considers issues of performativity and is reflected as a situated bodily practice. Fashion design is combined with humanistic care (Peters, 2014 ).

The book Fashion and Culture: Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies, from SB Kaiser, 2012 be cited 7 times. The main topic is the integration of fashion, design and culture (Kaiser, 2012 ). Jenss ( 2016 ), Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites, and Practices , is cited 6 times. The book explores fashion in wide-ranging contexts by stressing material culture and ethnographic approaches in fashion studies. Ryan ( 2014 ), Garments of Paradise: Wearable Discourse in the Digital Age, research about the wearable fashion based on the new era (Ryan, 2014 ). Fashion design industry impressions of current sustainable practices , 2014, Noël Palomo-Lovinski, the article explores professional fashion designers' understanding and awareness of current sustainable design (Palomo-Lovinski & Hahn, 2014 ).

As revealed from the analysis of the co-cited literature, the literature and research areas arousing more attention in the fashion design area from 2009 to 2016 consist of fashion sustainable design and sustainable development, fashion humanities, fashion design strategies, wearable technology, fashion and culture, and Chinese fashion.

Co-occurrence analysis for the research frontier and trends

Hot research topics.

A research hotspot refers to a research issue or topic explored by a relatively large number of articles that are intrinsically linked within a certain period. The keywords are the authors' high distillation and summary of the core content of the article, reflecting the research value and direction of the article. Keywords achieving high frequency are generally exploited to identify the hot issues in a research field. The noun phrases extracted from the article can also represent the hotspot of research in a particular field to a certain extent. Clustering analysis of keywords is performed by CiteSpace software to generate keyword clustering knowledge graphs (Hu et al., 2019 ). The mentioned clusters reflect the last 21 years of topics in fashion design research (shown in Fig.  6 ).

Co-citation clusters about “fashion design” theme

The silhouette scores of the major cluster that were focused on in the review were sufficiently high. Analyzing the size of clusters by Silhouette and size, and the cluster labels could be defined by log-likelihood ratio (LLR) to explain the term contained in. The top 10 keywords in the respective cluster are summarized in the Table 5 .

As indicated from the analysis of the keywords in the respective cluster, the research content of the respective cluster overlaps with each other. However, international research in the “fashion design” field can be summarized as eight major research fields: “Skill/Tools/Technologies/Material with fashion innovation”, “Wearing class and Art”, “Sustainable fashion”, “fashion design/ fashion designer and arts work”,” Education”, “fashion industry and business”, “fashion with culture”, “Medical fashion”.

(1) Skill/ Technologies/Materials with fashion design innovation. The common label that appears are: Wearable new materialism; technological innovation, wearable technologies, future mode, digital exploration, digital design, technological innovation, smart material systems. Promoted by the rapid development of society and science and technology, interdisciplinary learning and research has also emerged in the fashion industry. Innovative design, fabric innovation or innovative display combined with high-tech, novel materials and virtual or digital industries turns out to be a novel topic of great interest in the fashion industry (Barati, Karana, & Hekkert, 2019 ; Burns, 2022 ; Bower & Sturman, 2015 ; Chuah, Rauschnabel, Krey, et al., 2016 ; Feng, 2020 ; Ferrara, 2019 ; Huang, Tang, Liu, et al., 2018 ; Juhlin, 2015 ; Rocamora, 2017 ; Smelik, 2018 ; Smelik et al., 2016 ; Ünay & Zehir, 2012 ).

(2) Wearing culture and Arts. The common labels consist of dressing strategies, transgender fashion, men fashion, human right, accessorizing bodyscape, popular art, applied art. It focuses on different types of people, human rights and humanistic concerns, including unisex fashion. The collection is designed and worn with a mix of different arts, cultures and trends, as well as regional dress cultures, such as Chinese. The collection is inclusive of fashion and highly integrated with art (Chance, Camilleri, Winstone, et al., 2016 ; Geczy & Karaminas, 2011 ; Hancock, Johnson-Woods, & Karaminas, 2013 ; Martin, 1999 ; Mocenco, Olaru, Popescu, et al., 2016 ; Nelson & Hwang, 2019 ; Sabine Linke, 2013 ; Tullio-Pow, Yaworski, & Kincaid, 2021 ; Vainshtein, 2012 ).

(3) Sustainable fashion. Including the labels of sustainability knowledge, sustainable fashion, sustainable practice, communicating sustainability, sustainability knowledge, sustainable consumption, etc. Sustainable development and sustainability are a hotspot of discussion in academia. Sustainable fashion, i.e., Eco-fashion, refers to part of a growing design philosophy and sustainable design trend aiming to create a sustainable system capable of supporting environmental, socially responsible and sociocultural aspects (Aakko & Koskennurmi-Sivonen, 2013 ; De Brito, Carbone, & Blanquart, 2008 ; Fletcher, 2013 ; Gordon & Hill, 2015 ; Gwilt, 2020 ; Henninger, Alevizou, & Oates, 2016 ; Lundblad & Davies, 2016 ; Mukendi, Davies, Glozer, & McDonagh, 2020 ; Niinimäki, 2013 ; Shen, 2014 ; Wang & Lu, 2020 ).

(4) Fashion design, fashion designer and arts work. As the fundamental topic in fashion design field, the labels consist of design strategies, young fashion designer, costume design, South Korean contemporary fashion design, China fashion design, etc. Is the research about the characteristics of fashion in different historical stages, region, area, culture and style study (Bugg, 2009 ; Chang & Lee, 2021 ; Creigh-Tyte, 2005 ; Kawamura, 2004 ; Kim & Farrell-Beck, 2005 ; Larner & Molloy, 2009 ; Ling et al., 2016 ; Millspaugh & Kent, 2016 ; Park, 1993 ; Sterlacci, 2019 ).

(5) Education. Responsible fashion business education, teaching system, fashion design course, interactive teaching, fashion entrepreneurship education, etc. Educational methods have constantly been a vital topic required to be discussed, and teaching methods and concepts have been reformed and innovated to respond to social and economic development, as well as to the constant innovation of knowledge, skills and cultural heritage (Armstrong & LeHew, 2013 ; Faerm, 2012 ; Fletcher, 2013 ; Lee & Sohn, 2011 ; Stensaker, 2007 ).

(6) Fashion industry and business. In modern commodity society, the concept of fashion is more than a way of life and an inner state of mind. People's pursuit of fashion will change the existing mode of life and behavior, thereby constantly creating new demands. Accordingly, the emergence of new products is promoted, as well as the development of novel industries. Fashion products are not only characterized by commercial products, but also help create a fashion industry chain and huge economic benefits for its high added value, easy dissemination and wide circulation (Guercini & Runfola, 2010 ; Pal & Gander, 2018 ; Pedersen, Gwozdz, & Hvass, 2018 ; Şen, 2008 ; Shamsuzzoha, Kankaanpaa, Carneiro, et al., 2013 ; Todeschini, Cortimiglia, Callegaro-de-Menezes, & Ghezzi, 2017 ).

(7) Fashion with culture. The labels include cultural heritage, traditional craft methodologies, new vision, cultural identity, cultural knowledge, etc. Understanding the effect of culture on the fashion industry and design creation gives insight into the style of fashion people want. For the identical reason, fashion impacts the way we live. Fashion is impacted by changes in culture (e.g., modernization, art, and even innovative technology). It is noteworthy that fashion is created by people living in different cultures and places. If one wants to understand fashion, one should be aware of the cultures of different places (e.g., traditional cultures, cultural heritage, new cultural contexts, and cross-cultural exchanges) (Fillin-Yeh, 2001 ; Jansen, 2014 ; Ko & Lee, 2011 ; Roche, 1996 ; Rocamora, 2017 ; Woodside & Ko, 2013 ; Zou and Joneurairatana, 2020a , b ).

(8) Medical fashion, the labels (e.g., mask making, world view, disease prevention, wearable development and fashioning masks). The medical area fashion is listed as a separate field because of the specificity and timing of this field. Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020, the concern for health and disease worldwide has become an essential topic, and almost every research area has a connection with medical care, as impacted by such a general trend and environment, led to developments in the field of “medical care fashion” (e.g., the development of new materials, masks and protective fashion). In addition, due to the development of “human centred design” thinking, the current fashion industry not only pays attention to the creation of artistic works, but also pays more attention to humanistic care. The needs of special groups have also attracted the attention of the fashion industry, such as disabled people, etc. (Kim, et al., 2021 ; Koenig & Carnes, 1999 ; Li & Yim, 2021 ).

Keywords with the strongest citation bursts

Keywords with the strongest citation Bursts can be exploited to reflect the main research content of a research topic over time, and also to reflect the research trends in a certain time period. The tracking and identification of research trends can offer researchers information regarding the changes in research hotspots in the field of specialization, and can provide relevant inspiration and information for researchers in the field. Research frontiers are emerging theoretical trends and new topics that can be synthesized and judged in CiteSpace based on analysis of keywords with the strongest citation bursts (Li & Wang, 2018 ).

After running the CiteSpace software, 13 keywords with maximal citation bursts were obtained (shown in Fig.  7 ).

Top 13 keywords with the strongest citation bursts in “fashion design” area

In this study, the research scope is selected from 2000 to 2021, and the strongest citation bursts are concentrated after 2010. The mentioned consist of identity, culture, fashion trend, popular culture, design process, education, design practice, craft, etc. Moreover, the analysis of the strongest citation bursts complies with the following noteworthy points:

The topic of sustainable fashion has burst on the scene three times over the last decade, i.e., in 2015 for “sustainable design”, in 2015 for “sustainability”, as well as in 2018 for “sustainable fashion”. The evolution of sustainable fashion can be identified in the shift from “sustainable production” to “sustainable fashion” concepts. In the wake of the world's biggest ever garment industry disaster, the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh, having caused death of over 1100 people (Rahman, 2014 ) the fashion movement by complying with the concept of “sustainability” is fading massively, which reveals an increased interest in sustainable fashion and ethical practices in the fashion industry (Westervelt, 2015 ). As sustainability turns out to be a “megatrend” (Mittelstaedt, Shultz, Kilbourne, et al., 2014 ), the fashion field has changed dramatically in accordance with the concept of “sustainable fashion” (e.g., sustainable design, fabrics, production and consumption) (Watson & Yan, 2013 ; Mora et al., 2014 ). Moreover, today sustainable fashion refers to a movement and process facilitating the transformation of fashion products and fashion systems towards greater ecological integrity and social justice. Sustainable fashion is not only concerned with fashion textiles or products, but concerned with the dependent social, cultural, ecological and financial systems correlated with people.

Research rends and frontier on fashion design

The identification and tracking of research frontiers present researchers with the latest developments in the disciplinary research evolution, predicts the trends in the research field, and identifies issues required to be explored more specifically. Research frontier topics are novel topics of interest in the field, indicating the social environment and research context. In brief, it can be referenced for relevant researchers in this field.

After CiteSpace is run, keyword timing profiles are generated by time segment based on Cluster co-occurrence analysis (shown in Fig.  8 ).

Time zone view in fashion design research

From the time zone view, the research in fashion design can fall into four phrases. The first phrase is that the research situation before 2004 did not form a cluster, thereby indicating that the research on fashion design was scattered before 2004. The second phrase is from 2004 to 2010, thereby revealing that the term of “international modernism” appeared twice. It can be explained by the frequent cross-cultural exchange activities between nations. The research emphasis shifts from fashion research in the traditional sense (e.g., apparel characteristics, designer and design styles) to cross-cultural and regionally fashion culture research (e.g., China, Europe, and the US). The third phase is from 2011 to 2017, more clusters appear in this time period, thereby demonstrating a higher volume of articles published. The research topics in fashion design show a diversity of clusters keywords and a wider range of research directions (e.g., culture, regional fashion, traditional apparel, humanities, education, design approaches and techniques). The fourth stage is from 2017 to the present, the keywords of clusters are more obvious, especially the label around 2017: “wearable technologies”. The mentioned keywords include wearable technology, wearable devices, fashion technology, smart wear, and technology socks. This novel technology is “skin electronics” or “fashion electronics”, which are intelligent electronic devices worn near or on the skin surface to detect, analyze and transmit information regarding the body information, body signals, vital signs or environmental data and others; in several cases, the information can be delivered to the wearer (Chuah, Rauschnabel, Krey, et al., 2016 ; Çiçek, 2015 ; Farrington, 2016 ). The second label is “Transgender Fashion”, unisex fashion, embodies the humanistic nature of fashion. Moreover, the label in 2021 is concerned with “Medical Moment”. With the global outbreak of Covid-19, how to against the virus is the daily topic be concerned by global. Protective clothing, mask has become a necessity in people's lives. Based on this context, the fashion industry has also been affected. The fashion industry think more about the care and needs of the human body, “Medical fashion” has become a popular topic of research. As indicated from the academic view, the research direction of fashion design is closer to the society hot trends and interdisciplinary research. Caring for people's physical, physiological and psychological aspects, fashion research tends to be more human centred design.

Conclusions

By analyzing the frontiers and trends of fashion design research, this study reveals that at the beginning of the research period, the topics of academic research were biased towards research in the humanities (e.g., fashion design, designers, culture, humanistic care, locality, as well as arts work). The direction of research over the past few years has been impacted by the overall global dynamics as well as technological and economic development, thereby demonstrating that the trend of interdisciplinary and cross-border cooperation has entered a stage of development in recent years. The data collection and analysis time of this article is at the end of 2021, but with the development of time and science and technology, such as Digital fashion, Virtual fashion, AI design, Inclusive design, etc. have also become hot topics at the moment. The researcher believe it will produce more academic research in fashion design in the future time.

On the whole, research on the topic of fashion design still has a considerable scope for research. Scholars, designers and practitioners in the fashion field still face huge task. Accordingly, the researcher proposed several suggestions for how to strengthen the process and results of academic research. From a horizontal perspective, (1) the international academic community and researchers should enhance the interact, discuss and conduct collaborative research with each other to provide sustainable vitality and motivation for the research; (2) transnational, cross-unit and cross-border academic exchange and cooperation should be enhanced to create more possibilities for academic research; (3) additional, multilingual journal platforms should be offered for fashion or art fields. From vertical perspective: Combining or contrasting history with modernity. For instance, using new technologies to redesign or study historical apparel, etc. By combining traditional culture with modern technology, the scope of the time-line of fashion design research can be extended.

This study uses quantitative literature analysis to convey information from the literature by creating images, diagrams and information description. The existing state of research in fashion design is reviewed, and provide the knowledge base, the existing state of research, as well as research hot-spots and publication trends in fashion design research. This study can provide existing literature, knowledge map, new inspirations, and research directions to fashion practitioners, researchers, and research institutions. Based on this paper, scholars can efficiently familiarize the field knowledge and facilitate strategic adjustments by relevant institutions.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets supporting the research process and conclusions of this article are included within the additional files. For databases and research results, which is available and has no restrictions to its use by academics or non-academics.

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The authors are thankful to the Design Science and Art Research Center from Guangdong University of Technology, for providing the research facilities and environment for this study.

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YZ: Postdoctor, School of Art and Design, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510062, China.

SP: Lecturer and Ph.D., Ph.D in Culture-based Design Arts Program, Faculty of Decorative Arts, Silpakorn Univeristy, Bangkok 10170, Thailand.

TS: Postdoctor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China.

D-BL: Professor and Ph.D., School of Art and Design, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510062, China.

This research was received financial support from “Science and Technology Program of Guangdong Province: Overseas Famous Master Project” Guangdong province, China. The Project No. is 2020A1414010314.

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YXZ conceived the ideas, experimental design, data analization, interpretation of the results, and drafted the manuscript of the analysis. SP and ST gave technical guidance and provided continuous support to perform the experiment successfully,and gave the suggestions about the writing. DBL contributed to the interpretation of the results and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Future Technologies for Sustainable Fashion (FTSF) is a 2-month educational program in the context of the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation project ATTRACT. It aims to foster collaborations in the emerging field of Fashion Technology with a critical approach under the spectrum of sustainability, future scarcity, and space habitation. This program is done in collaboration with Fab Lab Barcelona | IAAC, IED and IdeaSquare-CERN.

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During 2 months, students will work intensively to develop emerging technologies that respond to societal needs through a hands-on approach, using digital manufacturing, first-person perspective methodology, multiverse thinking, and embodied design ideation methods. The resulting projects will be led by mixed student teams from the two participating institutions, FLB and IED, working under the guidance of a broader and multidisciplinary pool of experts in order to ideate and prototype solutions through a hands-on approach. 

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To ensure the established learning outcomes, IED and Fab Lab Barcelona | IAAC put at the disposal of the students a broader and multidisciplinary pool of experts with different backgrounds that will work jointly with the student’s team and advice their project development. Students will also ideate and prototype their proposals using the two institutions’ laboratories. Instructors will also foster peer coaching so that students can transfer their knowledge to each other and enrich their points of view with the use and appliance of different kinds of design methodologies. 

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The State of Fashion 2024: Finding pockets of growth as uncertainty reigns

The State of Fashion 2024

Storm clouds are gathering, but the experience of recent years shows how the fashion industry may ride out the challenges ahead. In 2022, the industry again showed its resilience, almost equaling the record economic profit of 2021, the McKinsey Global Fashion Index shows. Echoing the pattern of the previous year, the luxury sector outperformed, with a 36 percent rise in economic profit that offset weakness in other segments. Yet even the non-luxury sector was ahead of its long-term average. Strong margin performance meant the industry in 2022 achieved more than double the economic profit than in all years between 2011 and 2020, except for one.

In 2023, the industry faced challenges that were both persistent and deepening. On a regional basis, Europe and the United States saw slow growth throughout the year, while China’s initially strong performance faded in the second half. Though the luxury segment initially fared well, it too began to feel the effects of weaker demand in the latter part of the year, leading to slowing sales and uneven performance.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Imran Amed, representing views of Business of Fashion, and Anita Balchandani , David Barrelet, Achim Berg , Gemma D’Auria , Felix Rölkens , and Ewa Starzynska, representing views from McKinsey’s Retail Practice.

Looking toward 2024, the most prominent sentiment among fashion industry leaders is uncertainty, reflecting the prospect of subdued economic growth, persistent inflation, and weak consumer confidence. Against this backdrop, businesses will be challenged to identify pockets of value and unlock new drivers of performance.

According to McKinsey’s analysis of fashion forecasts, the global industry will post top-line growth of 2 to 4 percent in 2024 (exhibit), with regional and country-level variations. Once again, the luxury segment is expected to generate the biggest share of economic profit. However, even there, companies will be challenged by the tough economic environment. The segment is forecast to grow globally by 3 to 5 percent, compared with 5 to 7 percent in 2023, as consumers rein in spending after a postpandemic surge. European and Chinese growth is set to slow, while US growth is expected to pick up after a relatively weak 2023, reflecting the slightly more optimistic outlook there.

Beyond luxury, growth of 2 to 4 percent is predicted for the year ahead, in line with the probable outcome in 2023. The European market will likely expand by just 1 to 3 percent, compared with 5 percent in the first half of 2023 and 1 to 3 percent in the second half. Slumping consumer confidence and declining household savings are expected to be the most probable causes of restrained spending. In the United States, nonluxury sector growth of 0 to 2 percent is forecast. And China is expected to be similarly challenged amid 4 to 6 percent growth, which is a slight uptick from the end of 2023 but slow when considered on a historical basis.

These are just some of the findings from The State of Fashion 2024 , published by the Business of Fashion (BoF) and McKinsey. The eighth report in the annual series discusses the major themes shaping the fashion economy and assesses the industry’s potential responses. Reflecting in-depth research and many conversations with industry leaders, it reveals the key trends that could shape the fashion landscape in the year ahead.

Uncertainty in the face of headwinds

With conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and strained international relations elsewhere, geopolitics is the number-one concern for fashion industry executives going into 2024, followed by economic volatility and inflation. Some 62 percent of executives in this year’s survey, conducted in September, cite geopolitical instability as the top risk to growth. Economic volatility is cited by 55 percent and inflation is mentioned by 51 percent (compared with 78 percent last year). The global average headline rate of inflation is predicted to moderate to 5.8 percent—still high on a historical basis—from 6.9 percent in 2023. 1 World economic outlook update: Near-term resilience, persistent challenges , International Monetary Fund, July 2023.

Against a challenging economic backdrop, executive views of the industry’s prospects are more divided than in any year since the launch of the BoF–McKinsey Executive Survey in 2017. While 26 percent of survey respondents say they expect conditions to improve year on year, 37 percent see them remaining the same and 38 percent think they will worsen.

Uncertainty within the industry reflects the broader economic situation, albeit with regional divergence. Going into 2024, pressure on household incomes is expected to dampen demand for apparel and prompt trading down across categories. Still, there are geographic outliers that may offer comfort. One is India, where consumer confidence hit a four-year high in September 2023. 2 “Consumer confidence survey,” Reserve Bank of India, October 6, 2023. India-based executives are more optimistic than those in Western countries, with 85 percent of respondents to McKinsey’s Global Economics Intelligence survey  saying that conditions have improved in the past six months. 3 Ryosuke Hanada, “India’s consumer sentiment rebounds past pre-COVID levels,” Nikkei Asia, July 18, 2023. China’s economy is facing challenges, but the country’s consumers show a higher intent to shop for fashion in 2024 than consumers in both the United States and Europe.

Ten themes for 2024

To prepare for challenges and be alert to opportunities, leading fashion companies will likely prioritize contingency planning for the coming year. A key theme will be companies keeping a firm grip on costs and inventories while driving growth by precisely managing prices. Brands and suppliers can expect an increasingly competitive environment. But they will also have opportunities, with consumers discovering new styles, tastes, and priorities—all presenting routes to value creation. As previously done, this year’s report highlights ten emerging themes that will be high on leadership agendas.

Global economy:

• Fragmented future. In 2024, the global economic outlook will continue to be unsettled, as financial, geopolitical, and other challenges weigh on consumer confidence. Fashion markets in China, Europe, and the United States will likely face headwinds, some of which reflect individual regional dynamics. Suppliers, brands, and retailers may need to bolster contingency planning and manage for uncertainty.
• Climate urgency. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather-related events in 2023 mean the climate crisis is an even more urgent priority than in previous years. With physical and transition risks rising across continents, the industry must not delay in tackling emissions and building resilience into supply chains.

Consumer shifts:

• Vacation mode. Consumers are gearing up for the biggest year of travel since before the pandemic. But a shift in values means expectations are evolving, even as shopping remains a priority. Brands and retailers should refresh distribution and category strategies to reflect the new reality.
• The new face of influence. It’s time for brand marketers to update their influencer playbooks, as a new guard of creative personalities wins fans. Working with opinion leaders in 2024 will require a different type of partnership, an emphasis on video, and a willingness to loosen the reins on creative control.
• Outdoors reinvented. Technical outdoor clothing and “gorpcore” are in demand as consumers embrace healthier lifestyles. In 2024, more outdoor brands are expected to launch lifestyle collections. At the same time, lifestyle brands will likely embed technical elements into collections, blurring the lines between functionality and style.

Fashion system:

• Generative AI’s creative crossroads. After generative AI’s (gen AI) breakout year in 2023, more use cases are emerging across the industry. Capturing value will require fashion players to look beyond automation and explore gen AI’s potential to enhance the work of human creatives.
• Fast fashion’s power play. Fast-fashion competition is set to be fiercer than ever. Challengers, led by Shein and Temu, are bringing new tactics on price, customer experience, and speed. Success for disruptors and incumbents could hinge on adapting to new consumer preferences while navigating the regulatory agenda.
• All eyes on brand. Brand marketing is expected to be back in the spotlight as the fashion industry manages a switch away from performance marketing. Brands may benefit from forging emotional connections with consumers as marketers rewrite playbooks to emphasise long-term brand building.
• Sustainability rules. The era of fashion industry self-regulation is drawing to a close. Across jurisdictions, new rules will have significant effects on both consumers and fashion players. Brands and manufacturers may consider revamping business models to align with the changes ahead.
• Bullwhip snaps back. Shifts in consumer demand have created a “bullwhip effect,” by which order volatility reverberates unpredictably through supply chains. Suppliers will likely face pressure as brands and retailers focus on transparency and strategic partnerships.

Looking ahead

As the industry continues to be challenged by geopolitical and economic headwinds, fashion leaders in 2024 will look to strike a careful balance between managing uncertainty and seizing opportunities. With cost-saving tactics mostly exhausted, companies may focus on growing sales, underpinned by new pricing and promotion strategies. Across the industry, net intent to raise prices is more than 50 percent, according to the BoF–McKinsey Executive Survey. At the same time, reduced cost pressures could provide a potential boost to performance.

As climate change brings increasingly extreme weather events and global temperatures rise, the coming year is likely to mark a heightened industry focus on environmental, social, and governance issues. Our survey shows that the topic is seen as both the number-one priority and number-one challenge for industry executives. The most successful companies will find a balance between sustainability initiatives, risk management, and commercial imperatives.

In an uncertain world, consumer discretionary spend will be weighted toward trusted categories and brands. Hard luxury goods—jewelry, watches, and leather—will likely be in demand, reflecting their potential investment value in tough economic times. Consumers are expected to travel more and continue spending more time outdoors. And they prefer emotional connections and authenticity over celebrity endorsements.

All told, executives are bracing for a strategically complex year ahead. To counter uncertainty, leading companies will prepare for a range of outcomes. The most successful will become more resilient, better equipped to manage the challenges, and ready to accelerate when the storm clouds begin to clear.

Anita Balchandani is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office, where Ewa Starzynska is a consultant; David Barrelet is an associate partner in the Munich office; Achim Berg is a senior partner in the Frankfurt office; Gemma D’Auria is a senior partner in the Milan office; and Felix Rölkens is a partner in the Berlin office. Imran Amed is the founder, editor-in-chief, and CEO of the Business of Fashion and is an alumnus of McKinsey’s London office.

The authors wish to thank Asina De Branche and Joëlle Grunberg for their contributions to this article.

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Science and Culture: Researchers embrace fashion to show off science concepts

When fashion designers, retailers, and families attend Vancouver Kids Fashion Week, they expect to see models donning the latest in children’s fashion. But at an event last October, attendees saw scientists as well. Researchers from Michael Kobor’s lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, had set up a booth to showcase some of the model organisms they study. The fashion twist: Those model organisms later appeared on the runway, on a line of outfits created by fashion designers.

Mechanical engineer Angela Chang and designer Harry Umen came together to create the “Luminous Firefly Dress,” aiming to evoke ideas about how body gesture, light, color, and sound enhance personal expression. Image credit: Howard Eglowstein (photographer).

The collaboration between the Kobor lab and the fashion school at Vancouver Community College in British Columbia, Canada, started several months earlier. The researchers were desperate for ways to share their work with a new audience. Some lab members work on human genetics and epidemiology; others on basic research using animal models. The intricacies of the latter research, they found, weren’t easy to share with the general public. “The model organism research is just as important, but not as visible,” says graduate student Samantha Schaffner, who studies the epigenetics of Parkinson’s disease.

Schaffner and her colleagues started brainstorming ways to introduce these model organisms to a wider audience and quickly landed on the idea of a collaboration with a group outside of science. Initially, Schaffner and her team considered a wide range of art collaborators, from illustrators to jewelry designers. But Schaffner remembered another creative field from her childhood: Her mother managed a children’s clothing line, working with fashion designers to create hats called “Sam’s Tams.” Imagining the possibilities of colorful and eye-catching model organism-themed fashion, Schaffner suggested the lab contact the fashion department at the local community college. That’s when they reached out to Sarah Murray, the coordinator of Vancouver Community College’s fashion arts program.

Fashion Designers in the Lab

This wasn’t the first time that Murray had been contacted about a collaboration—her department regularly works with community outreach projects. But project requests were usually based on filling a practical need—designing a tote bag for a charity or adult bibs for a seniors’ home. The Kobor lab offered up the intriguing prospect of designing a new line of kids’ clothes inspired by biology.

Budding fashion designers rely on their portfolio to get ahead, and such an unconventional project would give them a chance to demonstrate their skills. The project also attracted a few designers who weren’t necessarily keen on kids’ fashion but were interested in using science as inspiration—a departure from seeking ideas based on sustainability or textile function. “For us it was an opportunity to explore a different topic,” says Murray. “Something far from the realm of what we normally engage with.” She gathered a team of seven program alumni, students, and instructors, and together they embarked on a summer-long collaboration to create a line of science-themed clothing.

The work started with a look behind the scenes at the Kobor lab, where the fashion-minded visitors examined Drosophila through a microscope. “The designers absolutely loved the flies,” says Schaffner. Fashion design graduate Nico Gruzling was intrigued by fruit fly anatomy and the experimental setup. “They walked us right through everything they do,” she recalls. Postdoc Maria Aristizabal showed them how the flies are kept awake to study the influence of sleep deprivation on the expression of certain genes. Inspired, Gruzling started working on her designs, which include a T-shirt with a screen print of an overly magnified fruit fly, and the repeating text “NO SLEEP.”

Schaffner noted the designers’ fascination with parts of her world that she had taken for granted—the multicolored tape that the researchers use to label reagent bottles, the grid of dots that forms when dilutions of yeast cells are tested on a nutrient plate. “It was really neat how they were finding visual patterns in things like plates of yeast,” she says. The lab encounter would be the beginning of an unusual collaboration—but not an unprecedented one.

The fashion designers who visited the Kobor Lab were fascinated by colors and patterns throughout the lab, including the multicolored tape that the researchers use to label reagent bottles and the grid of dots that forms when dilutions of yeast cells are tested on a nutrient plate. Image credit: Helena Brendler (The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada).

Fashion Forays

Indeed, researchers and fashion designers have worked together before. In 2013, former neuroscientist Yuly Fuentes-Medel, while studying the economy of innovation as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA, recognized that although science and the arts are both creative endeavors, they use completely different languages. Inspired to explore this disconnect, Fuentes-Medel sought ways to bring together researchers and fashion designers to find out how they could learn from each other and their respective approaches. This led to the Descience project, which she cofounded with three collaborators, all based in Boston at the time: Immunologist Patricia Torregrosa, a PhD student at Stockholm, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute working as a visiting researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital; fashion designer Claire Jarvis, who had just graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design; and graphic designer Isidora Valdés ( 1 ).

Descience paired up “creators”—one researcher and one fashion designer—as part of a competition. Initially started in the Boston area, the project expanded as interest piqued among researchers and designers at far-flung locales. Sixty-one Descience pairs from cities around the world eventually submitted designs for outfits.

Several pairs worked remotely, adding a further hurdle to the communication barrier. In one case, cancer researcher Esther Baena and designer Arielle Gogh used video chat to create their “Transmutation” dress based on Baena’s research ( 2 , 3 ). “We didn’t meet in person until we did the catwalk,” says Baena. She was in Boston and Gogh in Philadelphia, but they swapped tumor histology images and dress sketches to share ideas.

Baena wanted to create a fashion piece that evoked the process of tumor growth and how it’s studied in the lab. Gogh and Baena found common ground in the use of colors: Baena stained and analyzed her samples, while Gogh experimented with fabric staining methods. “We agreed that changing colors and volumes, as happens during tumor growth, would be a good way to communicate science through fabrics,” Baena notes. The final dress shows the transformations a tumor goes through as a result of DNA mutation, which inspired the name Transmutation.

Some designs were feats of engineering, not just fashion, such as a dress created by mechanical engineer Angela Chang and designer Harry Umen, who had met years earlier ( 4 ). “Having our own respective expertise in different backgrounds means that we can both lead the way on different fronts,” says Chang. Both were interested in exploring the possibilities of combining interactive electronics with textiles. With Chang’s engineering experience and Umen’s visual design skills, they envisioned the “Luminous Firefly Dress.” Chang took a road trip to New Hampshire where she and Umen—aided by seamstress Deborah Caldwell and technologist Howard Eglowstein—assembled the dress. Laced with strips of LEDs connected to a sensor that detects sound in the room, the dress lit up to the beat of the surrounding audio.

A panel of researchers and artists chose a Descience winner at a fashion show at MIT in September 2014. To expand the reach of the project, the show was livestreamed, and an online poll attracted close to 20,000 votes for the “People’s Choice” award. Chang and Umen continued working together after Descience, and they have shown an expanded collection at other events ( 5 ).

But for Fuentes-Medel, the main objective was to bring different disciplines together to foster innovation. “We weren't focusing on the end product,” she says. “We were focusing on the process.” Fuentes-Medel carefully studied the vocabulary and methods that researchers used to explain key concepts of their work to the designers, and vice versa. From this, she built an educational curriculum that she has since used to drive a collaboration between researchers and designers.

Designs on Development

That cross talk was at the heart of another fashion–science collaboration, first started in 1997. Developmental biologist Kate Storey, who specializes in human embryonic development, starting talking with her sister, fashion designer Helen Storey, about the first few weeks of an embryo’s major morphological change. “Helen visited the lab, looked down microscopes, looked at images, looked at movies, and we talked about different stages in development,” says Kate. They faxed sketches back and forth as Helen tried to figure out how to translate biology into a series of dresses inspired by embryonic development ( 6 ). Over the summer, they rented a school building and enlisted help from a team of people to turn the designs into outfits. Using a range of different fabrics, such as silk and fake fur, they created a chromosome patterning dress, a neural tube dress, a primitive streak dress, and several others—all encapsulating both biology and fashion form.

In the two decades since, the dresses have travelled the world, from Tel Aviv, Israel to Shanghai, China. For Kate, who is now head of the Division of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Dundee in Scotland, public outreach was only a minor aspect of the project. “It didn't make me design better experiments. It doesn't work like that,” she says, “But it made me think about the way I present what I do. It taught me different ways in, and ways in which people could relate to the kind of work I do.”

The Descience foray into science and fashion may have had an even bigger impact on Yuly Fuentes-Medel. “It shaped my entire career,” she says. A fashion industry neophyte initially, she is now regularly asked for advice by organizations such as the Council of Fashion Designers of America or Lineapelle, the leather association of Milan, who rely on her expertise in connecting fashion designers with researchers. In her role as project manager for fiber technologies at MIT Materials Research Laboratory, she recently brought students from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York together with MIT researchers to create an innovative running shoe, a challenge issued by New Balance. Working together, they came up with concepts such as a biodegradable shoe to mitigate landfill waste, and a biosensing shoe that transmits real-time health data.

Drosophila images from the lab inspired the form and color for fashion designs. Image credit: Helena Brendler (The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada).

Public Engagement

Before the Kobor lab connected with the fashion school, they considered other activities, such as a yeast-themed event at a brewery. But they soon recognized that if they hosted their own outreach event, they would attract people who already have an interest in science, so a collaboration would be better. Some science outreach projects have found a wider audience by placing projects in unconventional locations, such as shopping centers or music festivals ( 7 , 8 ). So the researchers decided to give that approach a try. According to fashion show attendee and researcher Simon Goring, they succeeded. “They really reached a new audience,” says Goring.

Goring, an assistant researcher in the department of geography of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, attended the show because he has a general interest in the way that researchers use outreach to connect with their communities. He was particularly impressed with how subtly the science was incorporated into the clothes. In Gruzling’s outfits, for example, the screen print of the fly with the text “NO SLEEP” does not immediately evoke an inspiration related to genetic research. “People could appreciate it for the fashion that it was,” he says. “I liked that the designers had gone into the lab and taken [science] as inspiration rather than designing things that were really on the nose.” One of the designers had created a dress using fabrics laden with the red and orange hues of the fruit flies, and the designer pair who became fascinated with lab tape created T-shirts with scattered stripes in the tape’s pastel colors.

Although the researchers did invite friends and colleagues, Goring was one of relatively few researcher attendees. Murray says the model organism runway presentation attracted a crowd similar to what they see at other Vancouver Kids Fashion Week events: parents and their children, designers, media, and others with an interest in the fashion industry. Schaffner says the lab is planning to hold a separate event for the research institute.

But the show and the Kobor lab visit have already left a lasting impression on both researcher and designer. “We’re both curious about our world,” notes Schaffner, “and trying to figure out how to express it in new, creative ways.”

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CIMODE 2022: Advances in Fashion and Design Research pp 312–322 Cite as

Collection Development Strategy for Fashion Retail

• Bruna Scaratti Selau 5 &
• Bibiana Silveira Horn 5  
• Conference paper
• First Online: 20 October 2022

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This article compares the methodological processes utilized in strategic design and fashion and its purpose is to develop a process proposal for fashion retailing employing the product-service system as the strategy. It confirmed that there is a reduced number of authors who address the methods and processes for fashion design related to product design. There is still no specific published methodology regarding fashion retailing. Thus, it was noticed there is an opportunity so that fashion methods delve more deeply into that perspective. It was possible to develop a proposal for developing a collection proposal for fashion retailing by uniting fashion methods, strategic design, and retailing, seeking their applicability to industry based on the obtained information. The results were based on bibliographic research to understand the utilized processes and data collection that investigated the reality of developing retail collections. The presented proposal shows how an alternative for reflecting more deeply on the theme, exploring the benefits used in the meta-design step in developing the collection, and addressing the under-exploited theme has been deficient in scientific fashion research.

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Selau, B.S., Horn, B.S. (2023). Collection Development Strategy for Fashion Retail. In: Broega, A.C., Cunha, J., Carvalho, H., Providência, B. (eds) Advances in Fashion and Design Research. CIMODE 2022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16773-7_27

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117 Awesome Fashion Research Topics: Inspirational Ideas List

Finding some decent fashion research topics that you can use for your next papers is not easy nowadays. You want something new, something original. Your classmates are probably scouring the Internet as we speak, so why are you still wasting time? Take a look at our long list of 117 exceptional fashion research topics and choose the best one right now.

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What Is The Fashion Research Paper?

Keep in mind that finding some great fashion topics to write about is not enough. You need to be able to create a well-organized, concise research paper. To help you do just that, we will show you the 8 main parts of a research paper:

Title page (or cover page) Start with a hook to catch the attention of your readers, then talk a bit about the background of the problem and present your thesis. Literature review. Here, you will need to demonstrate that you have analyzed the literature related to the topic and that there is a gap in knowledge that needs to be addressed. Research In this section, you will explain in great detail all the methods you have used to gather the data. Be as specific as possible. Data analysis. This is the section where you present and analyze the data. Be objective and avoid discussing the results. This is the section where you can discuss your findings and prove how your research results back your thesis. Don’t forget to acknowledge the limitations of your research. Restate your thesis and summarize your research and findings. Show your readers how your findings answer the research questions. References page. This is where you list all the resources you have used to write your research Make sure you don’t miss any.

Now that you know the overall structure of a research paper, it’s time to give you some excellent topics to write about:

Brand New Fashion Research Paper Topics

We will start our list with the brand new fashion research paper topics. These have been added to the list recently, so you can pick one right now knowing that it’s original:

• Fashion in Ancient Rome
• The impact of Jane Austen on the world of fashion
• Swimwear in the 1980s
• Using bizarre colors in fashion
• The rise and fall of the jeans
• Peer pressure related to fashion trends
• Social networking and fashion
• The life and work of Giorgio Armani
• Talk about hippie fashion
• Fashion in Islamic religions

Interesting Fashion Topics To Write About

If you are looking for something out of the ordinary, we have a long list of interesting fashion topics to write about. Take a look at the following ideas:

• The rise of the Chanel brand
• Does price reflect quality?
• Fashion in Ancient Egypt
• The sense of fashion in women
• The link between art and fashion
• Discuss ethics in fashion
• The relationship between style and money
• The role of clothes in your culture
• Interesting fashion hacks

Fashion Research Topics 2023

In the fashion research topics 2023, you can find topics that were greatly appreciated in 2023. These may or may not be as appreciated in 2024 though:

• Fashion in developing countries
• Research smart casual fashion
• Compare Asian fashion with American fashion
• Fashion and aesthetics
• Marketing a new brand of clothes
• Fashion in vlogging
• What are cycles in fashion?
• The rise of the Versace empire
• Fashion in Paris

Advanced Fashion Topics To Discuss

We also have a list of more advanced fashion topics to discuss. Just keep in mind that the following topics are not easy to write about. But as an option, you can buy a dissertation on any topic.

• Negative effects of fashion on the environment
• Forecasting new trends in 2023
• Celebrities and fashion
• Negative effects of fashion on the human psychology
• Influencer marketing of fashion products
• Fashion from a religious standpoint
• The place of leather in fashion in 2023
• Largest fashion shows in the world
• The importance of Fashion Weeks in Eastern Europe

Fun Research Topics On Fashion

Who said a research paper can’t be fun? Choose one of these fun research topics on fashion and start writing the perfect paper today:

• Fashion in 1990s media
• Funny fashion mishaps
• Men in fashion advertisements/commercials
• Fashion in medieval times
• Crossover fashion in 2023
• Can you start a fashion business?
• Fashion in the royal family (the UK)
• Fashion and school uniforms

Important People In Fashion

One of the easiest ways to write a research paper in the field of fashion is to research an icon. Here are some important people in a fashion that you can talk about:

• Karl Lagerfeld
• Stella McCartney
• Audrey Hepburn
• David Bowie
• Princess Diana
• Charles Frederick Worth
• Harry Styles
• Kim Taehyung
• Coco Chanel
• Designer Paul Poiret

Fashion Research Paper Topics For High School

If you are a high school student, you need some easier topics to write on. Check out these fashion research paper topics for high school and pick the one you like:

• Fashion in Ancient Egyptian times
• Michael Jackson’s fashion
• Fashion in Western Europe
• Fashion at the workplace
• Fashion in schools in the UK
• Discuss fashion in North Korea
• Luxury products and the human brain
• Fashion trends and the science that explains them

Captivating Fashion Design Research Paper Topics

In case you want to discuss fashion design, we have a nice list of captivating fashion design research paper topics right here. All these topics are, of course, 100% free to use:

• Fashion in the LGBTQ community
• Fashion in Nazi Germany
• Fun facts about beachwear
• The role of Versace in fashion
• New York as a fashion center
• Effects of Tik-Tok on fashion
• The origins of ethnic clothing
• Mixing 3 styles the right way
• Fashion and sexism in 2023

Fast Fashion Research Paper Topics

Don’t want to spend a lot of time working on that research paper? No problem! Simply choose one of these fast fashion research paper topics:

• The role of politics in fashion in the United States
• Talk about wedding ceremony fashion
• Talk about trends in baby clothing in the United Kingdom
• The role celebrities play in fashion marketing
• Talk about 3 iconic fashion characters
• An in-depth look at fashion in the punk world

Fashion Topics To Research In 2023

It’s time to think about the topics that should work great in 2023. In fact, our experts have already compiled a list of fashion topics to research in 2023:

• Talk about the notion of “invisible branding” in fashion
• Research women’s fashion in the 1980s
• The role played by art in fashion trends
• Research 3 major fashion companies
• Talk about the low rise fashion trend
• Discuss the women’s oversized bomber jackets trend

Fashion And Marketing Research Topics

As you probably know, fashion and marketing go hand in hand. Take a look at our latest and most interesting fashion and marketing research topics right here:

• Fashion marketing on social media
• Fashion marketing in the 1960s
• Effective marketing strategies for luxury products
• Style vs. functionality in marketing
• Marketing and fashion cycles
• The role of fashion in TV commercials

Fashion Ideas For College Students

College students should research topics that are more complex in nature. Don’t worry though; we have more than enough fashion ideas for college students:

• Research the hoodies under blazers fashion trend
• Compare Asian and European fashion
• Research Jane Austen’s style
• A closer look at minimalist fashion
• The beginning of the Haute Couture
• Fashion and the Internet

Unique Ideas Related To Fashion

This list of topics has been revised recently to make sure all ideas are unique. So, if you’re looking for unique ideas related to fashion, you have definitely arrived at the right place:

• Analyze the cropped cardigans trend
• Research the plus-size fashion industry in Indonesia
• The impact of feminism on fashion
• Social issues caused by fashion
• Fashion and cheap labor
• Effects of religion on fashion

Easy Fashion Essay Topics

If you want to make sure you ace that research paper, you should find an easy topic to talk about. Take a look at these easy fashion essay topics and pick one today:

• Discuss the notion of “color blocking”
• Fashion trends during World War II
• The evolution of men’s suits over the last 100 years
• Fashion and child labor
• What is organic clothing?
• Talk about the rise of wig fashion

Creative Fashion Research Questions

Professors really appreciate creativity, so you should definitely go through this list of creative fashion research questions:

• A closer look at the puff sleeves trend
• The Kardashian family’s impact on fashion
• How did Chanel rise to fame?
• Sustainability in the fashion industry
• Fashion and body types
• Interesting fashion trends in Dubai
• Talk about fashion in the armed forces

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Into this mix, in October, Stefano Ricci launched the latest of its Explorer project in Mongolia , whose rich culture and forbidding landscapes were muses for creative director Filippo Ricci’s newest designs. The Explorer project, which debuted in 2022 and has previously journeyed to Iceland and the Galápagos , is equal parts research trip, preservation initiative, fashion shoot, and once-in-a-lifetime travel experience. Former National Geographic Society executive vice president Terry Garcia acts as senior consultant, helping select locations (based on both conservation opportunities and adventuring wow factor) and support the missions. 

In each destination, a local cause is adopted. With the brand’s symbol being the eagle, aiding the Kazakh Falconry Association and its commitment to protect Mongolia’s dying art of eagle hunting, a tradition dating back to the 1600s, was a natural fit. “When you visit these places and see nature and culture under threat with your own eyes, it reminds you that we have a responsibility,” says Filippo Ricci, who joins Explorer trips along with his brother, CEO Niccolò Ricci. 

Lorenzo Quinn, the Italian contemporary artist known for his large-scale sculptures that draw attention to climate change, was the first to receive an invitation. Over five days in Mongolia in October, I joined Quinn and others on the journey, summiting 2,000-foot-tall sand dunes, sleeping in traditional circular tents known as ger, visiting working paleontological sites, and sharing meals of khuushuur (deep-fried meat pies) and buuz (steamed dumplings) with a crew of around of 20, including Niccolò and Filippo Ricci and the brand’s lead model, Tao Fernandez Caino. The project’s tagline—“explore the world to explore ourselves”—resonated with Quinn. “To live on the edge is to be willing to explore the unknown,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t even know you’re looking for something until you disconnect from life and experience a new place. That’s when transformation and inspiration happen.” 

And not just for invitees. Mongolia was the influence behind the fall-winter 2024-25 collection and the backdrop for its campaign. The traditional dress of the Kazakh eagle hunters can be glimpsed in the hooded down jacket made from chinchilla and cashmere blend with fox-fur trim, while the red and saffron hues of monks’ robes appear in scarves and sweaters. And the country has left its mark on the Florentine label in other, more lasting ways, with the superfine white fiber from the undercoat of the Capra hircus goats of Inner Mongolia spawning its own new label within the brand: Stefano Ricci Alpha Yarn. 

“Sometimes you have to go to uncomfortable areas to be wide-eyed,” he says. “It’s not for everyone.” Which is very much the point. 

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What to Pack for Alaska Cruise in August: Ten Days, One Suitcase

Cruise , North America Packing Lists , Travel Packing Lists

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An Alaska Cruise is the trip of a lifetime; In fact, it’s like two trips! I discovered that the only way I could make sure I had everything I needed for the variety of things we had planned was to create two small capsule wardrobes: one for the shipboard activities and one for the onshore adventures.

Read my tips on what to pack for Alaska Cruise in August and find out how to be glamorous aboard, an outdoors-woman ashore, and comfortable the whole time (in just one suitcase)!

What to Pack for Alaska Cruise in August

Written by: Wendy Craig

Packing for a cruise can be confusing and tricky. Perhaps when you learned there would be formal nights onboard, you had nightmarish flashbacks to ill-fitting prom tuxes and figure skater-style sequin dresses.

Don’t worry–being ultra-casual won’t be a hindrance on your cruise, and you can fit in with the formal dining nights with ease. While people certainly rock formal wear, my goal is to pack carryon only for the flights to and from the cruise terminals and to make sure my clothes are versatile as possible.

Creating an  interchangeable capsule wardrobe is the key to simplified packing, which can easily fit into a carryon suitcase with the help of packing cubes to compress your clothing!   

Start by reading these general tips for packing for a cruise:

• 10-Step Guide to Packing for Any Trip
• What to Pack for a Cruise Vacation
• What’s in My Carry-on Bag for a 2-week Cruise
• What to Pack on a Cruise: 7 Things to Bring and What to Leave Behind
• Understanding the Cruise Dress Code
• 10 Unexpected Things You’ll Experience on a Cruise

The key to planning   what to pack for Alaska Cruise was bringing tops and bottoms that could (almost) all be worn together. (The yoga pants get a pass because, hey, they are yoga pants; perfect for lounging about, hitting the climbing wall, and sleeping in!)

In two parts:  15 total clothes pieces, 4 shoes, 1 rain coat, 1 hat, 5 accessories

CASUAL CAPSULE WARDROBE

4 TOPS: 1  Wicking T-shirt , 2 T-Shirts , and 1 Yoga Tank 3 BOTTOMS: 2 Jeans and 1 Yoga Pants 2 LAYERS:   Fleece Jacket and Sweater  (similar) 2 OUTERWEAR: Raincoat and Wool Hat 2 SHOES:  Hiking Boots and Slip-On Sneakers

Here are our readers recommendations for the best shoes to wear on your Alaska cruise !

FORMAL CAPSULE WARDROBE 

3 TOPS:  Peplum Blouse (similar),  Cream Sleeveless ,  Black Nude Lace 1 SKIRT: Maxi Skirt 1 FORMAL: Maxi Dress 2 SHOES:  Heels and Flats 2 EARRINGS 1 SWEATER: Cardigan 1 PURSE: Wristlet 2 SCARVES: Scarf and Wrap

When planning what to pack for Alaska Cruise in August, the easiest way to use your Capsule Wardrobe is to write out both your itinerary and each corresponding outfit by day. For Example:

Day 2: At Sea

• Morning: Yoga, Climbing Wall, Breakfast (Yoga Pants, Tank, Fleece, Black Sneakers)
• Afternoon: Enrichment Lecture, Reading, Lunch (Change into Black Jeans)
• Evening: Formal Dinner, Dancing, Music in the Lounge (Gown, Heels, Earrings, Pashmina & Clutch)

Day 3 Ketchikan: Flight Plane Excursion

• Morning: Breakfast, Ashore to explore town  (Black Jeans, T Shirt, Grey Sweater, Hiking Boots)
• Afternoon: Flight Plane over Misty Fjords (Add Raincoat, Grey Scarf and Wool Hat)
• Evening: Dinner in Specialty Restaurant (Skirt, Peplum Top, Cardigan, Clutch, Black flats, Earrings)

My formal clothing was worn each evening as per the cruise dress code. I probably could have worn the same top for the semi-formal dinners, but it was more fun to have options. Each night after dinner, my husband and I would race back to the cabin to change into jeans and a sweater before checking out the evening activities.

I wore the same gown with a different scarf and earrings for our two formal nights. Although some people did not go all out, there were enough of us who did, making it very festive and totally glamorous; definitely worth the effort.

That being said, my casual wardrobe made up the majority of what I wore for this trip. I must say that I was pretty glad that I brought my little bottle of Febreze ; especially after our 9 mile hike to the Mendenhall Glacier and our horseback riding excursion!

Follow the rules of The Capsule Wardrobe . Stick with one color palette and make sure that you have a plan to wear the majority of your items at least twice. This will ensure that you have the perfect packing list for your Alaska Cruise Adventure.

What are your suggestions on what to pack for Alaska cruise in august? Comment below!

For more cruise packing tips, please read:

• What to Pack for a Mediterranean Cruise
• What to Wear on a Cruise to the South Pacific
• Caribbean Cruise Wear Essentials
• What to Pack for a Transatlantic Cruise

Suggested Travel Resources:

• Lonely Planet USA and Canada on a shoestring
• Lonely Planet USA (Travel Guide)

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Author Bio: Wendy Craig is a transplanted New Yorker living in the Pacific Northwest. Her wanderlust comes from a lifetime of Nomadic travel (Having lived in 14 different places across the US and Australia before graduating from High School) She has a passion for discovering the authentic and looks at each trip as an opportunity to see the world with new eyes. From researching to writing checklists, planning to packing, Wendy is in Love with every step of the Travel process.

37 Comments

Did you not need a packable down jacket?

I will be following these recommendations closely, I’m excited to have an Alaskan cruise on my itinerary for May 2024!

As many have stated above, layers, layers, layers! We did a 10 rail tour of Alaska in June, and wore everything from shorts and tank tops to hats/scarfs, mittens and long underwear. The weather is SO variable, depending on where you are in Alaska. Everything was super casual, even at dinner so that made it much easier. I did “dress” for dinner one night on our anniversary, which just consisted of wearing my clean jeans and a nicer top with a cardigan. ENJOY! Alaska is beautiful!

This information helped me decide what I would bring on our Alaska cruise. I dressed more casual on this trip than a Caribbean cruise.

Great ideas. Just returned from a JulyAlaskan Expedition cruise with Lindblad. 2 weeks and carryon only . My list was a little different as we spent lots of time hiking and on the zodiacs, and never “dressed” for dinner. Lots of layers and wool socks( my Bogg boots were my best friends).

Wish I would have had this before my Italy and Great Britain trips. Will definitely help me on my next excursion to Alaska. Found the tips and suggestions very helpful. Will definitely follow from now on for future trips. Especially now that I’m traveling solo. Will save the need for all that heavy luggage.

Thank you Wendy, Alex and bloggers for tips on packing for an Alaska cruise. Splitting the packing cubes in two – dress up and excursion was genius. Just got back from our cruise and all the rest in our group were so jealous that I could pack carry-on for the trip. Layering was definitely the key. We went from 80’F to 49’F over the week. For dress up nights everyone was pretty casual on our cruise so one of your flexible bottoms and a nice top would be perfect. Pack good waterproof shoes for excursions. Thanks again.

I just got back from a cruise to Alaska and had a great time! I looked here for ideas of what to pack before I went. Thinking of packing two capsule wardrobes was so helpful! I felt I had exactly what I needed and didn’t overpack like I usually do. It was so nice to be able to easily get through the airport and onto the ship with just carryon!

I’m leaving for Alaska in a month! This will be so helpful!!!

I should have rread this before article before I went on my cruise! Of course, both my Husband and I overpacked and also had lost luggage on our return trip. If we would gave each only taken a carry-on, we would have been able to enjoy our travels so much more. I will be back to research Travel Fashion Girl the next time we travel!

My husband and I are leaving for an Alaskan cruise that departs from Vancouver the beginning of September for a week. We will also have 3 days in Vancouver first. I’m a mess regarding packing for this trip. These wardrobe tips are helping me to begin organizing my thoughts for what to pack. Please let me know if you have any further suggestions. Thank you!

Thank you! An avid cruiser, part of the whole experience for me is to have as many different outfits as possible. I use your same strategy but on a much larger scale! Everything is a mix and match color palette and all goes together. I have found that I wear more casual pieces, shorts and t-shirts, than I do dressy pieces, as I also run back and change after dinner! Since we don’t go out much (ie, ever) i love the dressing up process on a cruise, probably the main reason that we like to cruise. I also do a rough plan for each day and each adventure. Thank you! (We also live in the PNW)

So glad you found this guide helpful Daryl, happy travels!

All this information is wonderful! Thank You so much

That is so amazing to hear, so glad it helped. Have an amazing time on your travels Laura! 🥰

Thank you so much for the helpful packing tips! Like another reader, I am traveling to Norway in July for a Norwegian Fjords cruise. The idea of two wardrobes – one for day and one for night – makes so much sense on a cruise! I have an LBD and a couple of other dresses for evening as our cruise doesn’t really have formal dining. My plan of hiking shoes and pants/skorts for day seems to be doable. So glad to see a visual of this capsule wardrobe!

Thank you so much for your feedback Gina, we are so happy to hear that you have found this helpful. Have the most incredible time on your travels ❤

We are cruising for a week to Seattle on July 21 (after spending a preceding 3 weeks in Anaheim/Palm Springs/PCH/Yosemite/PAC NW starting July 3!). Since we are flying from Florida for a month, my goal is to pack carry on only for both a long California vacation + Alaskan cruise. I also want both of my kids and husband to do the same, although I’m less optimistic there. This article was helpful, particularly (a) writing out all the outfits to go with the cruise itinerary, and (b) the small febreze bottle suggestion! Thank you TFG for all your packing lists and articles – been enjoying them since 2013!

Hi Sandy, so pleased we have been able to help you with your packing!! Have an incredible time on your trip, sounds so exciting!! ?

Great ideas. What changes if any would you make for an early May cruise to Alaska? Thanks

Hi Amy, so pleased you enjoyed the article. Thanks for your question! We’ll share your question here so the author of the article can reply 🙂

Thanks for this list! I’m going on a cruise to Alaska in a month and this list will be very helpful. Thanks!

In 15 days cruise to Alaska 10 days. Thanks I thought this wardrobe out , I am packing just like you shared . woohoo excited for adventure.❤

Grateful for this list! I’m cruising the Norwegian Fjords in September and this is easily adaptable to my trip. I’m still stressing a bit about it since the weather can be very changeable plus we’re on a small ship where the dressing for dinner each night is required. Eeek! I have found a great LBD plus a couple of wrap dresses & a shift dress that don’t wrinkle. I think I’ll just recycle those for the entire trip (4 dresses total). LOL

Yes, recycle those dresses and add a colorful pashmina and costume jewelry to change the look. You can even add a light cover up 🙂

Great ideas… thanks so much for the tips. My husband and I will be cruising to Alaska for 7 days this July in between other travels to the Pacific northwest (we’ll be gone a month). Your suggestions are very doable. Since we’ve retired, I’ve been working on developing a travel wardrobe made up of three colors – navy, gray, and purple/raspberry, so your examples were pretty right-on. Was there anything you wished you had that you didn’t bring?

That sounds like a great plan Janis! The article was written by a guest author, I haven’t been on this cruise unfortunately. I hope you have a great time 🙂

Hello, I am about to go on an Alaskan Cruise in the end of June. Any suggestions?

Help…I’m planning on a cruise to Alaska, leaving on May 29th. Will be on the Carnival Legend. Will be doing some sightseeing off ship and want to be dressed nice, not formal for dinner. What do I need to pack for this type of vacation?

Thanks for the tips. It was helpful for our Alaska cruise.

That’s awesome Muriel! Glad to help! Anything we should change?

We are going to Anchorage, Seward and Denali for 2 weeks! I leave in 6 days! Any ideas for layering? I like what you have shown on this website. We are not doing the cruise. Five days is going to be fishing. I won’t be fishing but I will be on the fishing boat. And how cold will it be near the glaciers? I want to be comfortable and not cold or wet. Should I wear elastic pants? lol

This sounds like a great trip 🙂 Take a look at this post for layering ideas http://bit.ly/2a93zi4

Thank you so much for these graphics and tips. I am packing for cruise/ two weeks in Northern Isles including Iceland. After much perusing of web, I landed on your page. Very helpful!

You are so welcome 🙂 Glad you’ve found the page useful!

please make a list for visiting Dubai in early April.

Hi there! I’ll add it to the list 🙂

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