In just the past year, the rush of AI and the economics of a world on edge have pushed consumers into a kind of fast-forward evolution. What happens in 10 years? Or 20 years? Or by the end of the century?
Anything beyond the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump feels like a million years from now.
But there are good reasons to lean in just a little bit and check the winds of change, even as the nation looks back during its 250th anniversary. Any glance over the horizon turns up lots of possibility and many questions.
Will consumers grow more “postalgic?” What would an intelligent T-shirt do? Can spiritual fulfillment be found in consumption? Will AI dehumanize life?
It’s tempting to just let it all be Gen Alpha’s problem — but that’s not good enough.
Technologically, culturally and in every other way, the future is coming fast for everyone — and seemingly with more force than ever.
The good news is that it’s not necessary to leap into the next century all at once.
“Foresight done well is connect the dots, not fill in the blank,” said Marc Palatucci, who leads Future Today Strategy Group’s fashion, apparel and luxury practice. “It’s important to start with some of the probable, nearer term stuff and you hypothesize from that point forward. You don’t kind of just take a shot in the dark and say, ‘Well, wouldn’t this be a cool future?’ You want it to have that basis in reality and the data and information we have available to us today.”
For instance, brand is among the most powerful forces of fashion today. And the latest big, big thing in technology, of course, is artificial intelligence, whether generative chatbots or the new agents getting ready to go off and do everybody’s bidding.
What happens when those two factors really meet could dictate the industry’s next turn.
“There’s still great value in brand, but how that brand gets communicated, it’s [going to be] a little bit more through translation or a game of telephone” as AI agents make more decisions for shoppers, he said.
“Brands that have put a lot of stock into controlling their narrative and controlling their brand identity simply won’t have the same degree of control anymore,” Palatucci contended. “What’s going to be really important is a level of authentication, not just of the product, but of the narrative, of the brand identity. If I have an AI intermediary saying, ‘Well, here are all the products from this brand,’ how are they being presented to me?”
That’s a right now kind of question about the relatively near future.
Further ahead — and nobody can really say how far — is what happens when and if AI makes the leap from the digital world to the physical one with some kind of a robot revolution.
“How do we capture a master tailor or master seamstress at work and all of the physical nuances of what one individual has really mastered?” Palatucci said. “And is that something that there’s an appetite for?”
A robot tailor is an idea that fits easily into a sci-fi movie, but would consumers clamor to have a suit made by one?
“If it’s a way to preserve and kind of protect that really precious skill and unique personal knowledge, then maybe there’s sort of a silver lining or a positive aspect to it,” Palatucci said. “And then also, say that person works exclusively with a great fashion house, that can then become their IP.”
Consumer Connection
With technology changing how people shop and what they can buy, consumers are going to continue to change themselves.
“Future consumption will be about affiliation,” said Laurence Lim, founder and managing director of Cherry Blossoms Intercultural Branding. “Consumption has always been about identity. This is not changing, but what is changing is that consumption will become more and more about chosen affiliation.
“Societies, and especially the U.S., are becoming more individualistic,” Lim said. “It’s all about me, radical individuality. You see the rise of self-expression. In the U.S., it’s very extreme, about intersectional identities and subcultures and rejection of mainstream, very micro segmented identities.
“We see this growing need for belonging with the progress of tech, AI, social media, the rising isolation, need for connection. Community becomes super central because the young generation is super lonely,” she said.
That will open up more opportunities that foster community and consumer connection points.
Lim also sees a future consumer who’s “an intangible value seeker.”
“You have the tangible value of products or luxury, like the quality, the craftsmanship, but we see that people pay more and more for the intangible, the experience, the brand universe, but also for the brand’s ethical values,” Lim said.
She described this shift from ownership to experience as the “dematerialization of social capital.”
This is something like the current retail pivot toward experience, but on steroids.
Lim said consumers would “seek spiritual fulfillment through consumption and the brands that will win or the brands, which will be able to offer the sense of community that churches or institutions were offering in the past and a sense of transcendence.”
“The more AI will dehumanize our lifestyles and our lives, the more we’ll get back to the more existential needs — connection, belonging, spirituality, artisanship,” she said. “People want to have real-life experiences. Even in luxury, we see that trend. People want to get back to the boutique and they want to talk to a salesperson.”
The Deep Future
As culture, consumers and technology all evolve, they will continue to come together in new ways that, for now, could seem scary — or just bizarre.
Rohit Bhargava, founder of the Non-Obvious Company, said consumers could start to hide from the ever-watchful eye of surveillance technology.
“This idea of cloaking yourself is going to be more and more important to people where they can literally shield themselves from being tracked everywhere that they go — sometimes because they don’t want to be served up ads or personalized or monetized in some way,” Bhargava said. “There is going to be a category of cloaking apparel that is designed to help you shield yourself from all of these things.”
And then, when consumers aren’t hiding, they’re telegraphing everything they’re feeling.
Maybe.
“There are always behaviors that blow older generations’ minds, but become commonplace among the next generation,” Bhargava said, pointing to the ability to share what one is spending their money on over payment platforms like Venmo.
“One of the things that may start to come, and this is more speculative, is clothing that demonstrates your mood,” he said. “You can have this indication of what you’re feeling so other people can interact with you based on that.”
That would bring the mood ring into the 21st century.
“Maybe there’s certain apparel that broadcasts your emotion so that now you no longer have to have someone read those emotional cues,” he said. “They literally get some sort of a physical manifestation of it.”
There is, in fact, lots of room for more technology in apparel.
Bhargava pointed to experimentation around apparel with haptic feedback technology that could give the wearer a sensation when, say, the quarterback is tackled at a football game.
He also wondered how an intelligent T-shirt would work and how an intelligent pair of shoes could react to the wearer’s activity level.
It’s all a lot of movement and technology and pressure — enough to turn the future consumer back toward the past.
“Already we’re starting to see people choose the old version,” Bhargava said. “They’re choosing to listen to music on vinyl. There’s already a turning back of the clock. People are like, ‘Oh, that’s nostalgia.’ But it’s actually more ‘postalgia.’ They’re nostalgic for a time that they didn’t even live. We want to have this chance to turn the clock back or to go with this more tactile ‘older’ version because we want that as a luxury.”
Clearly, the idea of what counts as a luxury isn’t the only thing changing in the future.
