What happens when technology becomes more pervasive while consumers simultaneously seek ways to escape it? When niche communities carry more cultural weight than mass audiences? And when AI makes creation more accessible while raising new questions about who has access to its benefits?
These tensions ran through Digital Fashion Week NYC’s panel, “Future Signals: Understanding What’s Next in Fashion, Culture and Technology,” moderated by Haseeb Fonte, COO of the Fashion in Gaming Awards and managing director of Reality Hack at MIT Founders Lab, with Cassandra Napoli, head of consumer forecasting at WGSN; Barry McGeough, senior vice president of innovation and strategy at Next Now; and Zasckia Villatoro, senior trade marketing manager/luxury fashion at Kering Group.
Rather than pointing to one single future, the panelists agreed that fashion’s next phase will be defined by coexisting contradictions. Consumers can embrace AI while craving analog experiences; discover products through hyper-personalized feeds while gravitating toward niche communities; and demand convenience while placing greater value on touch, physical spaces and human connection.
As WGSN’s Napoli put it, “two things can be true at the same time.” For brands, reading the future may depend less on identifying the next big thing than on understanding how these tensions will shape what consumers want next.
For example, consumers want to stay online while simultaneously craving offline experiences. They say they want to shop sustainably while continuing to buy newness—driven by cost, convenience and the algorithm’s dopamine loop.
Napoli pointed to the WGSN forecast “Niche is the New Norm.” Every consumer now has a different version of TikTok’s For You page, and therefore, a different definition of what is culturally relevant.
To Kering’s Villatoro, this means protecting what is already unique. Companies need to focus on “understanding the niche of the brands, protecting the identity, the codes of the brand, but also thinking how we can leverage subcultures and other communities to target those consumers,” she said.
This shift means that the old mass-media playbook has less power. Fonte described his own experience marketing smart glasses and virtual reality, where he shifted focus from expensive mass-market advertising toward influencers and niche media.
The key is not simply to advertise within these communities but to seamlessly become part of them. That might mean participating in run clubs, gaming communities or other subcultures rather than relying on one-off campaigns. A brand can sponsor a run, but the bigger opportunity is to keep showing up after the run ends.
“Smaller brands are actually in control right now because they have the means to embed themselves into culture more naturally,” said Napoli.
The Technology Tension
Technology is also transforming commerce. McGeough stressed that brands need to understand how people shop, not simply which technologies are emerging. “I take Instagram seriously as a commercial platform,” he said, pointing to the shift toward social commerce and digital-first purchasing.
AI is accelerating that transformation, with increasingly powerful tools putting sophisticated capabilities into the hands of smaller companies and individuals. “We are all now coders. We don’t even know it yet,” McGeough said.
The fashion impact is potentially enormous. AI can generate marketing campaigns, build interfaces, analyze information and automate workflows that previously required teams of specialists. This gives a “new unfair advantage” to smaller and younger brands which can move without the legacy systems and organizational weight of larger companies.
On the flip side, there’s a brewing tech backlash.
AI represents one of the trend tensions shaping culture and Napoli noted the growing “luddite” movement and interest in “dumb phones,” with younger consumers questioning the role of technology in their lives. She cited WGSN’s 2029 forecast “The Human Premium.”
“The data says [younger consumers] want to go back into stores,” she said. “They want to touch and feel. The senses are incredibly important.”
Kering’s Villatoro thinks the shift will be more sweeping. “I think in 10 years we’re really going to go back to analog,” she said, describing a desire to “engage with people in real life.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean technology disappears. Instead, the emerging opportunity may be using technology to enhance physical experiences rather than replace them. A garment could become a storytelling platform, with a digital layer revealing information or experiences that couldn’t be accessed through the physical object alone.
McGeough, however, warned that the AI revolution could create a new divide between people who have access to technological enhancement and those who do not.
We’re already in a K-shaped economy, and he described the possibility of a “K-shaped workforce” and ultimately a “K-shaped society,” driven partly by unequal access to AI and its vast computing resources. And as companies increasingly rely on AI-generated tokens (“tokenomics”), the question becomes not simply who owns technology, but who has the resources to use it.
