The State of Fashion 2018 was created to provide a comprehen-sive view of the fashion industry. Its principal aim remains to lay out the interconnectedness of the entire fashion ecosystem across regions, market segments and product categories by distilling the industry’s current and projected performance, and addressing the factors shaping and driving fashion today and in the year to come.
To accomplish this, the report relies on extensive qualita-tive and quantitative analyses, drawing on industry and proprie-tary sources, including executive interviews, the BoF-McKinsey Global Fashion Survey, and the McKinsey Global Fashion Index, which tracks industry sales, operating profit and economic profit (value creation).
The report is split into two sections: Section 1 provides an overview of some of the massive long-term changes in the fashion industry that serve as a backdrop for everything that is happening. These are overarching, interconnected forces that will drive and shape the trends in years to come. Section 2 provides an outlook for 2018, forecasting the expected growth for the fashion industry across regions, market segments and product categories, highlighting the top priorities for executives, and defining the ten trends that we believe will set the agenda for the industry over the next 12 months.
In order to present a full picture of the ecosystem and bring to life the complex and multifaceted aspects of the industry, the report also includes a series of deep dives and executive inter-views on some of the most exciting developments, including the the impact of artificial intelligence on ecommerce platforms and a once in a generation tipping point that could change the balance of power in the global fashion industry.