The Building Blocks of the NEW Fashion Industry

Nataliya Makulova

Aug 19 · 3 min read

As some of you have already noticed, my 3+ years old bi-monthly newsletter has become a powerful news curation resource for all of us to get a better understanding of what is happening across the fashion & retail industry and how you and your company may contribute to the shift towards the NEW Fashion Industry*. As a global business advisor, I’m expanding it from local, NY-based newsletter with events curation into a more global industry perspective, with news & happenings curation, as I’m living my digital nomad life, I’m noticing that my subscribers are now more spread all around the world and are active in the fields that are beyond fashion.

* By the NEW Fashion Industry, I mean the industry that is based on conscious consumption, ethical production and sustainable use of resources, based on its original creativity, enticing and inspiring qualities.

In order to ground this article, in the current, transitional reality, I’d like to remind that the traditional fashion industry is not only about making clothing for a purpose of covering our bodies and as a source of money earned from selling such basic commodity. Its innate qualities, beyond physical are emotional and cognitive: clothes are inspiring a wearer for free self-expression, non-verbal communication of who the wearer is in our world. I see the fashion industry today as a creative tech industry, where anything we want to build out of it is possible. If you are following me on Instagram and signed up for my newsletter, it means that you most likely have a similar purpose as I do: to make a positive, impactful shift in our community for the greater good of the humanity. If we are aligned with these goals, whatever your community or industry is, you can go on reading this message. If we’re not aligned at this time — might as well move on to the next task, as this message may not resonate with you.

My purpose is to be the voice of the truth of what our community of the NEW Fashion Industry could look like and assist businesses in raising up to this truth, seeing the new, exciting opportunities into what is possible and dive into the creative process of the NEW Industry that truly matters at the times like this. I have this cool superpower to paint a vivid picture with my words and emotions on how this industry may look like, embody it by believing in its potential existence and inspire us all in creating a meaningful shift with each of our’s life’s work.

To break my vision of the NEW Fashion Industry into 3 simple components, I see it as a combination of the following:

1. Fashion as ART

Traditional craftsmanship, fair-trade, ethical, transparent, sustainable — fashion brands with purpose, impact-driven companies supporting the NEW industry movement, stores as showrooms and galleries, retailers that resell used goods, etc.

2. Fashion as SERVICE

Rentals, subscriptions, recycling/circular fashion businesses, repairs, sustainable production technologies, new fabric science, on-demand production/automation, customer education and transparency technologies, such as RFID & Blockchain etc.

3. Fashion as EXPERIENCE

Digital fashion, VR/AR & 3D modeling & visualizing, analytics/AI/big data used for new shopping experience creation, etc.

I’ll unfold these in more detail in the upcoming newsletter editions.

We’ve come up with this concept of 3 components with Olga Johnston Antonova, the founder of EcoStyle360 and Circular Fashion education & consultancy, while passionately discussing our favorite topics of innovation in fashion at her Berlin apartment during Berlin Fashion Week this July.

From now on, to assist in our mutual visualization process of the NEW Fashion Industry, I’ll be categorizing the news I bi-weekly curate for this newsletter into these 3 main building blocks. I’ll start with general new industry news, and divide news under each building block to bring the maximum clarity of our NEW Fashion Industry vision and end the curation with the OLD industry news — that news that is still playing the old game of survival of the expired fashion industry. The news, written by those who are not yet so open-minded towards the Shift in humanity’s consciousness towards sustainable, logical and innovative, impact-driven business activities. We have to be aware of what’s happening on the whole field of the Greater Industry in order to be able to make the most obvious, educated decisions.