Fashion Month starts September 1st—actually, there are two fashion months: in February designers unveil their new fashions for the year, while September is reserved for designers to showcase their looks for the upcoming year.
We’ve been noticing some rather odd fashion fads these days. It’s too soon to call these real trends, so what do you think? Will they take off or will they flop?
What’s new in women’s fashion industry trends?
- Extremely long sleeves. We think they look kinda cool, but is it realistic to think someone would wear these all day without them constantly getting in the way?
- Oversized jumpers. Not sure what’s going on under there, but it could be good for hiding extra food for winter.
- Denim boots. When you’re looking for that perfect footwear to go along with your blue jeans and denim shirt.
- Big knit sweaters. Whatever you lose in structure/fit, you gain in softness. We could see these sweaters actually taking off.
Women’s Fashion: Hot, Not, Next…
While most people think of Fashion Month as just a bunch of parties for the rich and famous, the truth is, it’s big business. With a global market value of $759.5 billion in 2021, the fashion industry (including apparel, accessories, and footwear) is the top e-commerce sector in the world. By 2025, the industry will grow to just over $1.0 trillion. Women’s fashion generally represents around 51% of total sales.
Consumer and market intelligence platforms like Skai are used by apparel brands looking to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the category and get ahead of the latest trends.
Skai collects more data than anyone else relevant to apparel (social reviews, product listings, ratings, reviews, patents, etc.) so that brands don’t miss a thing. Then, we apply natural language processing so that it’s easy to extract what is happening in the apparel category and why — and what will happen in the future. And we visualize the insights in a way that makes it easy to understand for anyone from insights, marketing, brand, product innovation, and more.
Our Women’s Clothing category includes data from over:
- 40,000 products
- 8 million consumer discussions
- 7.5 million consumer reviews
- 9,000+ key opinion leader posts
- 38,600+ patents
So what is the data showing us? Let’s take a look!
What’s Hot?
- Seamless has been getting a lot of buzz these days on social media, with a 1248% year-over-year increase in mentions within women’s clothing posts.
- Calvin Klein has the most women’s clothing products on Amazon.com than any other brand (12,000+), including 6,012 dresses.
- Corsets might be making a comeback. Mentions in social media and product reviews are up 137%, or 2.1x, from February to May.
What’s Not?
- High-rise (also known as high-waisted) garment pants/jeans sit high on the wearer’s hips—about 3 inches above the belly button. There has been a 56% decrease in new High-rise products over the last year.
- Preshrunk has been a sustained trend for some time, but while there are 16.300+ women’s clothing products online that mention Preshrunk, there were only 638 new Preshrunk patents in the last 12 months, representing a 60% decrease year-over-year.
- Over-the-knee is a feature that is showing up 40.3% less in consumer posts versus the previous year.
What’s Next?
- Sweat Absorption. Our mothers always told us women don’t sweat, they glisten. That being said, there has been a 1337% growth in social media posts and 2,246 new patents filed that use the term related to women’s fashion.
- Anti-cellulite isn’t a term that most people associate with apparel. In fact, only 24 women’s fashion products online mention this benefit—and zero products have come out in the last 12 months. However, there’s an 1146% growth in social media posts over the same time period, so consumers are talking about it which means there could be an untapped market here.
- Batwing sleeve is something that sounds like Batman’s gal pals might be into. While just 5 new products in the last year mention this term, there has been a 43% increase in consumer reviews mentioning Batwing sleeve and a 431% increase in social posts. Holy Fashion Trends, Batman!
Top Women’s Fashion Brands (by online products)
The Big Women’s Fashion Trend to Watch: Pockets
Women have been complaining about the lack of practical pockets in their clothes for what seems to be as long as clothes have been around.
Based on Skai’s innovation analysis, there have been 3,184 new women’s fashions patents filed recently that highlight the term, “pocket”.
That represents the single most popular term in women’s fashion patents and there just might be a giant wave of new apparel featuring this feature.
