Global Fashion Conference

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the current trends shaping the fashion industry, with a particular focus on digital innovation and sustainability. This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the current trends shaping the fashion industry, with a particular focus on digital innovation and sustainability. It presents the proceedings from the 11th Global Fashion Conference held in Bucharest, 2024, which since its creation in 2008, has endeavoured to contribute to the recognition of a sectoral innovation system. This volume brings together insights from leading scholars and practitioners to illuminate the transformative role of information technology across the fashion value chain. Readers will encounter a diverse array of topics, including the impact of IT on fashion design, the challenges of eco-design, and the future of sustainable materials. The chapters delve into critical questions such as how digital tools can support eco-designers, the role of artificial intelligence in reducing online returns, and the potential of the metaverse in luxury fashion. By examining these issues, the book invites readers to consider the broader implications of technological advancements on sustainability and industry practices. Ideal for students, researchers, and professionals in the fashion industry, this book provides valuable insights into the intersection of technology and sustainability. It serves as an essential resource for those seeking to understand the evolving landscape of fashion and its implications for future innovation and development. Isabel Cantista is the Dean of the School of Economics and Business Studies - University Lusíada (campus of Porto and Famalicão) and a Senior Researcher at COMEGI. Her area of research is innovation for sustainability. She is a Visiting Professor at ISEM Fashion Business School, in Madrid. This book brings together a set of contributions through which it is possible to understand the recent evolution and the moment of disruption in which the textile and fashion industry finds itself. Considered for a long time as a traditional industry with a reduced technological component, its competitiveness is now imposed by technological dominance, both in terms of new materials or processes based on biotechnology, and in terms of data processing and digitalization of processes, from production to omnichannel distribution, the use of metaverse and Artificial Intelligence. In this book, the cases of the Zara and Shein brands, new materials and digitalization of processes along the entire value chain are analyzed. Everything is in transformation, including Fashion Education. All these changes will lead to questions about the circularity and sustainability of the industry.

Pages: 259, Hardcover, Palgrave Macmillan