Opinion: Can Bespoke Fashion Scale To Mass Market?

Notwithstanding the current situation, imagine being able to pop into a shop and order clothing and accessories tailor-made for you. 

While bespoke dressing is something most of us would love to incorporate into our lives, it hasn’t happened yet on a mass scale. With fast fashion taking full advantage of tech to churn out clothing at breakneck speed - often more quickly than the original designs they knock off, one would expect bespoke practices to do the same.
Turns out, this may very well be the future. With so much emphasis and focus on intentional consumerism, having clothes made specifically for your unique frame isn't the challenge it once was. You no longer need to bring standard sized items to a specialist tailor for precision fit, as a lot of brands are doing it in-house before your items even reach your front door. 

In the 1990s, futurist and Google scientist, Ray Kurzweil, predicted that everyone would be designing and ordering clothes online by the turn of the millennium. And while the technology existed at the time, it didn’t happen according to his timetable purely due to the fact that users didn’t have a simple interface available that they could use to customize their clothes.

With massive, compound improvements in both web browsers and shopping apps, the issue of a usable interface without complex calculations is now a moot point, which means both personalized fashion and accessories are likely to take off in this decade in a big way. Once people experience the benefits of wearing clothes made explicitly for them, going back to generic shops and sizing will be difficult.

An early mover is in customization is the jewelry industry. Brands are specializing in finding the perfect loose diamonds to insert into their custom-made rings. Clients are now able to specify everything, from the shape of the ring to the number of stones. In other words, they’re able to build jewelry from the ground up and commission a company to make it, but without all the costs or overhead that used to be associated with it.

The entry of sole producers and artisans into the market is also having a profound impact, expanding the amount of creative talent in the industry. Shoppers no longer have to rely on the ideas of a select few designers heading up creative teams at big jewelry houses. We’re at the stage where consumers are able to tap into the talent of people who might not otherwise have had illustrious careers in the jewelry industry. And that can only be a good thing. 

So, yes, it does look like customized fashion will become the future. New technologies are going to make it easier to make individual items by order, instead of having to make them en masse. And improvements in user interfaces will mean that designing your perfect outfit in apps is easier than ever.