Fashion & Textile Forecast
This tool expresses macro trends using inspirational visuals, text and keywords, fashion colour combinations, and textiles swatches sampled from all over the world. A design and marketing forecast covering fashion, accessories, textiles, consumer archetypes, and styling. The forecast is personally conceived by Lidewij Edelkoort every six months, published in September for Spring/Summer season and in February for the Autumn/Winter season.
TRADITION: Autumn / Winter 2027-28
fashion by Prada
This book is the result of my personal quest to understand our times and read the chaotic, barbaric, irrational turmoil we are living through. Gradually, the world is shifting to the right, and then to the extreme right, almost unnoticed sometimes. The Silicon Six* are planning the overhaul of democracy and the founding of feudal provinces and city states, to literally divide and govern society while avoiding paying taxes. To overrule we the people; a moment when we will have to abandon our sovereignty to the hegemony of AGI.
Yet, the reason the world is turning to extremes and why governments are becoming authoritarian must have other reasons than purely political and economic ones.
I believe this is the result of the long loss of traditions that have left us bereft of emotions, of celebrations and rituals, of religions and spiritual practices, of family and even friends, of social cohesion. The digital age has already exacerbated our ongoing lack of purpose and managed to turn people into introverted citizens, unable to meet and flirt, uninterested in having sex and unwilling to congregate.
We therefore must design innovated traditions and curated conventions that are at once steeped in historic mores and manners, yet also completely contemporary and irreverent, blending periods, mixing ages and merging ancestral knowledge with intelligent technology. Something able to bring us together again. Inviting us to bond.
As always, fashion is proposing several answers to make people confident and self-aware, through perfected style insights. With a vengeance, we will embrace conventional clothes and spiritual garments, nostalgic outfits, magic crafts, ritual robes and outdoor outfits that can withstand wear and tear and time. This urgent desire to give form to innovated traditions might introduce an amazing fashion revival in its own right, igniting a wish to dress up and play the part.
– Lidewij Edelkoort