Fall Winter 2023 2024 Fashion Print Trend Forecast: Runway Inspired Trends to Plan Your Range

As a freelance textile print designer one of my favorite parts of designing prints for fabric when working with clients or ones available for purchase in my catalogue is trend research and looking at the narratives that will come to shape our lives in the seasons ahead. Why is trend forecasting such a big part of my design process? Understanding the context and emotional landscapes behind consumer needs is what helps me create fashion prints and patterns customers will love!

Textile prints and color have the power create visual identities consumers want to be a part of to continue grow and express themselves! Every trend forecasting agency whether a large global player like WGSN and Peclers or a smaller scale independent freelancer all bring a unique perspective and interpretation on how trends and key seasonal narratives affect the consumer. Having multiple viewpoints and diversity of opinion can often help strengthen your design process to create bestsellers for your category and deliver the styles your customer will want, right when they need it!

As a textile designer having designed prints and graphics for fashion and lifestyle brands, I focus on how seasonal macro themes are reflected visually in the artwork through the balance between color, motif, scale, composition, layout, and technique and can be adapted into commercial styles suited to your brand and your customers' liking. The print and pattern trend report I put together for Fall/Winter 2023/2024 is a great tool to help plan a range whether you work 18-12 months ahead or through closer to market capsule drops to deliver styles for your customer. It includes three overarching key seasonal themes, 16 motif centric trend boards, color palettes including Pantone color cards and is suitable for anyone in design centric industries including designers, manufactures, art directors, brand managers, stylists, consultants and more. Enjoy a preview of the three main themes for the FW'23-24 season below and you can find the full version Fashion Print Trend Forecast here.

Fall/Winter 2023-2024 season highlights multiple contrasting realities consumers will be facing as they look to fashion to support them in navigating the tensions and anxieties of adjusting to new hybrid lifestyles while also exploring their fresh creative prowess arising from greater social and physical closeness.

Creative Unity

This theme is powered by an intrinsic quest for creative newly that lets consumers to focus unifying themes and expressions that bridge the gap and divides between genders, ages, styles expressed through vibrant, dynamic, and color rich styles. A few favorite quotes I find really speak to this theme on are from Nicolas Ghesquiere and his inspiration for Louis Vuitton Fall/Winter 2022-23 womenswear collection and Miuccia Prada for Prada's womenswear collection. Both quotes reflect a desire for connection and a desire to transcend boundaries, limitations, and restrictions felt collectively irrespective of gender, age group, or culture.

"The collection was inspired by the state of young adulthood “an excursion into a perceptible, fleeting, and decisive moment when everything comes to the fore, in all its innocence and insight. The impermanenc e and beautiful volatility of adolescence.” - Nicolas Ghesquiere, Louis Vuitton, Fall 2022

The sentiment was also echoed in Prada's Fall 2022/23 Womenswear Collection“You want to live again, to be inspired. And to learn from the lives of people.” - Miuccia Parada

Key motif directions include rhythmic geometrics, dopamine inducing plaids, multicolour mixing, bold blooms, and refined tie dyes that can be adapted as directional fashion forward niche styles or commercial friendly with mass market appeal.

Elevated Homebody

The third key narrative for Fall/Winter 2023-2024 is inspired by the consumers need to balance the busyness and complexity of their daily routines with calming and comfort inducing designs to encourage a sense of confidence, ease, and effortlessness. This theme aims to balance simplicity with versatility to elevate essentials that can transition consumers between casual and formalwear. Key for loungewear, active, après-ski, outerwear, sleepwear, and pieces that can mix between casual and formal occasions.

Calming, muted, pastel colour palettes add versatility and inject a sense of tranquil to reduce mental and emotional overload. Motif directions include soft focus stripes, toned down geometry, artful flora, interstellar, and chromotherapy that can work as workhorse timeless staple prints with great commercial appeal.

A quote that speaks well to the is from Susan Fang's Fall/Winter 2022-2023 womenswear collection:

"I felt like maybe now we don’t have to use our exterior to prove that we’re equal, or it doesn’t have to be something on the surface anymore, and it feels safe enough to just do what we like, like wearing soft clothes wouldn’t mean that we are soft inside." - Susan Fang, Womenswear, Fall 2022

Introspective Decadence

Renewed appreciation and desire for dressing up and celebrating occasions balances inward looking directions and qualities through decadent expressions. This theme plays up extravagance juxstaposed with resilience built through overcoming anxieties and challenges the past few seasons. Key for outerwear, dresses, occasionwear, and formal styles. Deep rich jewel tones, muted murky darks are juxstaposed with bright luminant chromas that create a sense of alluring depth and movement. Motif directions include rose garden, phantom florals, spotted, stone age, fluorescence, and Ocean life.

A quote that speaks well to these mercurial tales is from Maisie Wilen from Fall-Winter 2022-2023 womenswear collection.

“I wanted to delve into what could prompt the viewer to question their reality. The clothes have optical illusions, and we use a lot of textiles with visual effects. It’s all presented in such a seamless way; because the viewers can feel that tension between what’s real and their digital lives.” - Maisie Wilen, Womenswear, Fall 2022

Check out the full Fall Winter 2023-2024 Fashion Print Trend Forecast here for more a more in depth look on key trending prints and graphics. Looking for color inspiration, read more about key trending colors for FW'23-24 in this post.