Fashion Trends and Forecasting: The Fashion Futurists’ Toolkit

Fashion Trends and Forecasting explores how designers, merchandisers, buyers, marketers and strategists use fashion trend forecasting to predict upcoming trends and understand past or current ones.

It explains the importance of trend forecasting for businesses and how technology such as artificial intelligence can help to advance it for the future. Addressing both macro- and micro-trends, including fashion styles, textiles and colour trends as well as the impact of technology such as AI and the metaverse, the book offers guidance on how fashion students can address fast-changing consumer needs and demands and identify wider shifts in the cultural, environmental, political and technological worlds. Case studies from globally recognised organisations feature in every chapter, highlighting and contextualising theory for students. Discussion questions, further reading and exercises help facilitate class discussion and deeper understanding.

Designed to equip the reader with Fashion Forecasting tools, methods and principles in an accessible and clear way, this text is recommended and core reading for students studying fashion forecasting, fashion buying and fashion marketing.

Supplementary online resources can be found at www.routledge.com/9781032541860 and include a short instructor’s manual of points to be used for seminar discussions and chapter-by-chapter PowerPoint slides for instructors.

Eunsuk Hur is Programme Leader for BA Sustainable Fashion and former research group leader in Fashion Marketing and Management at the University of Leeds, UK. She has worked as a trend forecaster, business consultant, and designer. She has been teaching and researching strategic foresight, sustainable fashion, and marketing since 2013.

Caroline Hemingray is Associate Professor in Fashion Marketing and Colour at the University of Leeds, UK. With a background in Textile Design, and a PhD in colour prediction for sustainable fibre blending, Caroline’s research interests include the virtual fashion industry, data-driven colour forecasting, and the non-image-forming effects of colour.

Stephen Westland is Professor of Colour Science and Technology in the School of Design, University of Leeds, UK. His research interests include colour imaging, colour design, machine learning and sustainable manufacturing processes. He has published several textbooks including Computational Colour Science using MATLAB (2004; 2012) and Universal Principles of Color (2023).