Fashion moves fast. Brands face the constant challenge of predicting future trends to create garments and collections that resonate with consumers. Traditional methods often fall short, leading to overproduction, unsold inventory, and missed opportunities. So with the intro of more and more sophisticated trend forecasting tools, I wanted to briefly checkout the latest in AI trend forecasting and understand what the likely impact will be – will it deliver more sustainability or fuel more fast fashion?

A look at the latest solutions

Heuritech, a French startup, has a novel approach where it analyses social media images. Heuritech possesses an AI-based visual recognition technology and a forecasting model allowing apparel brands to quantify and predict what people wear, based on the large dataset in fashion. Their technology analyses more than 3 million social images a day – this is to enable fashion businesses to arrive at a balanced collection assortment adapted to regional market specificities and reduced overstock.  Just this month they analysed the print trends for 2025, showing that bold, clashing patterns and vibrant colours are making a strong comeback, redefining fashion across luxury, streetwear, and ready-to-wear.

Stylumania, an AI company based in India, has a consumer intelligence tool that is looking at what’s available for consumers, what is selling/ what is not selling, down to the colour size level for assortment planning.  They analyse millions of consumers’ voices to define consumer likes and dislikes. Their tool Imagenie, goes a step further, translating this insight to generate design shortlists using a simplified and gamified dashboard that produces winning permutations and combinations of design ideas curated to a particular brand/ designer DNA. Belle AI, an AI startup, goes a step further focusing on real-time automated planning for every product to minimise overstock and understock while providing planners and buyers with a cutting-edge experience.

WGSN, is an established trends and insight provider. WGSN looks at trends from a multitude of angles. They look at shows and over 5 million attributed catwalk images; they look at social and over 100,000 social media posts monthly to classify images posted by these influencers at scale; they look at instore sales to collect and classify product data from major global ecommerce sites; they look at search with over five years of search history; and finally, they look at sentiment surveying 17,600 consumers monthly.  They leverage this data to deliver insights, and product predictions.

How has AI helped?

The short answer: a lot.  An academic paper last year,  “Enhancing Fashion Forecasting Accuracy Through Consumer Data Analytics: Insights from Current Literature, look at all of the AI and models” reviewed the evidence.  They concluded: “…this represents a paradigm shift in the industry, offering enhanced accuracy and responsiveness in trend prediction”. One of the most significant impacts is the improved accuracy of trend predictions through machine learning algorithms that can analyse vast amounts of unstructured data, such as social media posts, to identify emerging trends with unprecedented precision. This is bolstered by the diverse datasets that are now used to enable brands to get to more robust and more holistic recommendations.

More sustainability or fast fashion?

There are benefits on both fronts clearly.  Accurate trend prediction translates into less overproduction and waste by ensuring brands produce more of what is needed, less of what’s not. This delta of over-production is squeezed which has a significant sustainability benefit.  The counter to this is that AI enables brands to release new collections at unprecedented speeds.  This might encourage a more rapid turnover of trends and more disposable consumption.  This dynamic however I’d argue is not driven by AI. It’s existed long before.

Ultimately, AI-driven forecasting boosts accuracy, visibility, and efficiency for brands. And with sustainability becoming a growing priority, this efficiency is a further step in the right direction.

PS. If you are interested in diving into some recent live trend forecasts for this year, check out Zalando’s 2025 Trend Forecast, Heuritech’s Top trends for 2025, and The catwalk trends for 2025/2026 from WGSN.

PPS. When you are ready to dive into some AI-powered fashion tech, please do check out our AI Sizing, AI Listing and reach out for a chat.