Foresight Friday: Rose Coffey, senior foresight analyst

Every Friday, The Future Laboratory team offers an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, senior foresight analyst Rose Coffey reflects on the state of fashion and where the system is heading.

: As fashion month draws to a close, questions about the health of the industry feel more urgent than ever. Climate instability, geopolitical tension and slowing global demand are intensifying scrutiny of a system long associated with excess.

In a recent Business of Fashion article, Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto voiced his frustration: ‘Fashion has become a joke. It’s all about money. The major companies of fashion, they’re like kids playing kid soccer, just running after the ball. They’re not thinking about their customers.’

Yet, I still believe there are glimmers of hope. At the British Fashion Council, new CEO Laura Weir is reshaping the agenda, ushering in investments in emerging talent through expanded scholarships and the scrapping of designer fees to show.

At a more grassroots level, designer Connor Ives has turned protest into impact: since launching the Protect the Dolls T-shirt last season in response to the Trump administration’s rollback of transgender rights, more than 14,000 units have been sold – raising over £900,000 ($1.3m, €1.1m) for Trans Lifeline, an organisation that provides financial services to the transgender community (source: New York Times).

: Meanwhile, cultural institutions are also interrogating fashion’s direction. At London’s Barbican, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion marks the gallery’s first fashion show in eight years. It features work from over 60 renowned houses alongside emerging designers from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

One of my favourite fashion historians, Caroline Evans, published a seminal book in 2003. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness explored fashion’s relationship to death, decay and collective anxiety. 

Today, these themes are resurfacing, with intensity. The exhibition highlights a growing rejection of glossy AI-generated imagery and hyper-polished beauty tropes in favour of rawness, imperfection and even dirt.

I particularly enjoyed the recent coverage in Dazed, which spotlighted the work of designers who are subverting aesthetic norms and embracing the unpolished.

Keep an eye out for our upcoming macrotrend report on this theme. In the meantime, you can explore more insights from our Beauty and Fashion sectors.