Scenarios: strategic tools for a reflective fashion

“Future” has always been an essential dimension to fashion. However, recent practices in trend forecasting seemed to pull the future itself away from fashion, generating a tricky paradox where external issues - given by global challenges - and internal tensions - outlined by relentless market rhythms - clashed feeding fashion’s unsustainability. The pandemic event marked a point from which the next steps towards the future have to be thought of carefully. Thus, fashion firms need to develop new approaches to tackle global challenges, heightening their awareness of change and sharpening their visions thanks to a more reflective attitude towards distant futures. By analyzing how the fashion industry has been mastering the short term horizons lately, the contribution aims to investigate the role and the responsibilities of forecasting practices in fashion, especially when it is intended to inform and give consistency to marketing strategies. Broadening the interpretation of forecasting through the lens of future studies, the paper aims to further the discussion on the potential paradigm shift to a “fashion forecasting”, where scenarios as tools to re-direct and re-tune social and and environmental sustainability could offer support in the construction of new systemic strategies while building social narratives.