Editor’s Note
Abstract
The relationship between fashion and technology is hardly new. Fashion has always been shaped by techniques of making, systems of production, material innovation, and changing forms of mediation. What is changing today is not simply the number of technologies entering the field, but the extent to which technology is altering the terms through which fashion itself is conceived, produced, experienced, valued, and governed.
For some time, fashion technology has been understood primarily through a logic of application: new materials applied to garments, digital tools introduced into design, intelligent devices incorporated into wearables, and new media used to extend fashion communication and consumption. Within this formulation, fashion remains a relatively stable domain to which technology contributes additional capacities.
That formulation is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
As computational methods, connected devices, generative systems, environmental metrics, and digital infrastructures become embedded across the fashion system, technology no longer stands outside fashion as a discrete set of tools. It participates in defining what a product is, how value is measured, how experience is organized, how cultural forms are represented, and how responsibility is distributed across firms and supply chains. Fashion is no longer simply a domain in which technology is applied, just as technology can no longer be understood merely as a set of tools available to fashion. Increasingly, the two are constitutive of one another.
The contributions gathered in this issue offer different points of entry into this changing relationship. They range across corporate value, sustainable innovation, and supply-chain governance; smart wearables and digital fashion experiences; material culture and computational approaches to heritage; consumer behaviour, cultural markets, and environmental accounting. Their value as a collection lies less in their conformity to a single theme than in the questions that emerge when these apparently different objects are placed in conversation.
One such question concerns the relationship between innovation and accountability.
Innovation has long occupied a privileged position in discussions of fashion technology. Yet as technological systems become more consequential, demonstrating novelty is no longer sufficient. The more difficult task is to establish how technological and sustainable interventions can be defined, measured, evaluated, and governed.
The studies in this issue concerned apparel brand power, sustainable innovation capability, PFAS control in industrial supply chains, and carbon-emissions accounting approach this problem from different scales. Together they point to a broader methodological shift. Concepts such as sustainability, brand value, innovation capability, and environmental responsibility cannot remain aspirational categories if they are to function analytically. They require boundaries, indicators, evidence, and mechanisms.
This matters because sustainability has entered a different phase in fashion research. The central question is no longer whether sustainability should be pursued. That normative case has been extensively made. More demanding questions now concern how environmental responsibility is incorporated into organizational practice, how consequences are traced through complex supply chains, what should be measured, and where accountability ultimately resides.
Technology is central to this transition, but not because technology automatically makes fashion more sustainable. Measurement systems, data infrastructures, chemical-control strategies, and accounting models can make previously diffuse processes more visible and potentially more governable. At the same time, they determine what counts as evidence and what falls outside the frame. The task of scholarship is therefore not simply to celebrate technical capacity, but to examine the assumptions and consequences built into the systems through which sustainability becomes measurable.
A second development concerns the movement from digitization to reconfiguration.
Much of the earlier language of digital fashion emphasized the translation of existing activities into digital environments: physical products became virtual representations, retail became e-commerce, fashion shows entered online platforms, and garments acquired connected functions. These developments remain important, but the more interesting research question now lies elsewhere. What happens when digital technology begins to reorganize the relationships among products, bodies, data, audiences, services, and markets?
The contributions on smart wearable technology and immersive digital fashion shows make this distinction particularly visible. A smart wearable is not significant simply because a garment contains a sensor or can generate data. Its broader implications arise when connectivity changes the relationship between a product and a service, between use and data production, or between technological capability and business-model design. Similarly, an immersive fashion show should not be treated as innovative merely because it takes place through a digital interface. Its significance depends on how technological configuration affects experience, participation, communication, and the forms of attention through which fashion is encountered.
This suggests that the familiar distinction between “physical” and “digital” fashion is becoming less analytically useful. The more consequential distinction may be between the digitization of an existing practice and the reconfiguration of the relations that constitute that practice.
This is where fashion research and technology research genuinely begin to converge. The question shifts from What technology has been introduced? to What relation has changed because of it?
A third question, and perhaps one of the most intellectually consequential for the field, arises at the intersection of technology and cultural interpretation.
Several contributions in this issue engage with revived materials, Miao patterns, and the morphology of the Zhuang embroidered ball. At first sight, such work might be described under the familiar heading of technology-enabled cultural preservation. Yet that description is no longer adequate once cultural forms enter parametric, computational, or generative processes.
Digitization is often discussed as though it were a neutral act of preservation: a pattern is recorded, an object modelled, or a traditional form reconstructed so that it can circulate in a new technological environment. But computation necessarily involves selection and abstraction. A pattern must become a set of identifiable features; morphology must be translated into variables; cultural associations may be organized into categories; generative systems require rules concerning what may vary and what should remain recognizable.
At that point, technology is no longer simply preserving culture. It is participating in its interpretation.
This raises a fundamental issue for fashion technology. Cultural heritage is not a repository of visual forms waiting to be converted into usable design data. The process of computational translation inevitably privileges some attributes over others. It can reveal structures, create new possibilities of reconstruction, and extend cultural circulation; it can also detach forms from histories, practices, and systems of meaning that are less readily encoded.
The relevant question, therefore, is not simply whether technology can reproduce a cultural form with greater precision. It is what kind of cultural knowledge is produced through that act of translation. What becomes computable? What remains resistant to computation? What is retained, what is transformed, and what is newly created?
These questions will become more pressing, rather than less, as generative technologies acquire a larger role in fashion design. Greater computational power does not reduce the need for cultural interpretation. It makes the quality of that interpretation more consequential.
A fourth development concerns the object of fashion research itself. The field is increasingly moving from the study of individual products, designers, or consumers toward an understanding of fashion as a distributed system.
The presence in this issue of research drawing on the film market and the film and television industry is instructive in this respect. Such work should not be justified simply by invoking interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity has little scholarly value when it amounts only to placing methods or vocabularies from different fields alongside one another.
The stronger question is whether comparison generates analytical gain.
Fashion, film, and other cultural industries differ in their material forms, production structures, temporalities, and modes of consumption. Yet they may also share problems of symbolic value, networked diffusion, volatile attention, complex supply chains, and culturally mediated consumer behaviour. Research across these domains becomes useful when it clarifies which mechanisms travel across sectors and which do not.
This also changes how we should understand the boundaries of Fashion Technology. A field becomes intellectually stronger not by making its boundaries infinitely elastic, but by knowing why and under what conditions it crosses them.
Taken together, the studies in this issue work at very different scales: from chemicals and materials to design forms and garments; from individual consumers to firms and platforms; and from markets to industrial supply chains. They employ equally varied approaches, including indicator construction, behavioural modelling, parametric analysis, multi-platform data, environmental accounting, generative reconstruction, and decision-analysis methods.
Such methodological diversity is characteristic of a developing interdisciplinary field, but diversity should not itself be mistaken for intellectual progress. Neither a more complex model nor a newer technology necessarily produces a better piece of research.
For Fashion Technology, a more demanding standard is required.
What does a particular technology allow us to know that we could not know before? What relationship becomes visible through a new method? What assumptions are embedded in the act of measurement? What happens to cultural meaning when it is rendered computationally tractable? Who acquires new capacities when a fashion system becomes data-driven, and who assumes new responsibilities? Where does innovation create value, and where does it redistribute risk?
These are not secondary questions to be asked after technological development has taken place. They belong at the centre of fashion technology research.
The field, in other words, should resist technological solutionism as much as it resists technological conservatism. Technology is neither an autonomous force that inevitably improves fashion nor an external threat from which fashion must be protected. It is part of the material, institutional, cultural, and economic arrangements through which fashion now operates.
For this reason, the most significant research in fashion technology will not necessarily be the work that employs the newest technology. Nor will technical sophistication alone establish scholarly significance. The stronger contribution is the one that identifies a consequential problem, chooses methods genuinely appropriate to that problem, makes its assumptions visible, and remains precise about the scope of the conclusions that can be drawn.
This, in my view, is also an important task for Fashion Technology as a scholarly platform. A journal in this field should certainly remain attentive to emerging technologies. But it should do more than record technological change. It should create a space in which the meanings, mechanisms, limits, and consequences of that change can be examined with equal seriousness.
Technology changes quickly. Scholarship has a different responsibility. It must determine which changes matter, explain why they matter, and develop the conceptual and methodological resources through which they can be understood.
The papers brought together in this issue offer a range of responses to that responsibility. More importantly, they leave open questions that deserve further investigation. It is in that space—between technological possibility and critical explanation, between innovation and accountability, and between computation and cultural meaning—that some of the most important work in fashion technology is now taking shape.
We are grateful to the authors whose work has made this issue possible, to the reviewers who have contributed their time and expertise to the editorial process, and to the editorial team for its sustained work in bringing these contributions together. We hope that this issue will not simply document current developments, but contribute to a more rigorous conversation about what fashion technology is becoming—and what kind of field we want it to become.
August 2026
