Fashion and Digital Technology (PDF)

After a profound crisis that deeply affected Europe and the Western world, dramatically showing the weaknesses of previous paradigms, the present challenge for a mature sector such as fashion is re-connecting social communities with their roots and with smart cultures. A new age of interactive and interconnected lifestyles, searching for more sustainable approaches and products, is opening up novel opportunities for the fashion sector. There are huge opportunities created by the new generation of key enabling technologies such as digital fabrication, advanced manufacturing, wearables, sensors and embedded systems to renew not only fashion products and their meanings but also fashion processes and business models.The special issue will present and discuss theoretical framework and best practices to support the development of design processes and tools to enable, reactivate and reconfigure relations and processes in research, production, product, logistics and retailing of the traditional fashion supply chain, highlighting new approaches and innovations enabled and nurtured by digital technologies.Within this framework, the articles collected in the special issue will offer an innovative approach to the reading of the relation between Fashion and Digital Technology discussing interrelationships between the organizational and creative models and the digital tools and innovations and the quality of design-oriented innovation within Digital Fashion products, processes, and markets.