Exploring the nature of digital transformation in the fashion industry: opportunities for supply chains, business models, and sustainability-oriented innovations

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the digital transformation of the fashion industry and describes the opportunities and influences on supply chains, business models, and sustainability-oriented innovations that it offers. Desk research was performed to review emerging cases of companies that engage actively in using 3-dimensional virtual and digital (3DVD) technologies, such as 3D modeling, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), 2- and 3-dimensional (2D/3D) scanning, and digital twinning (DT). The analysis shows how the adoption of digital technologies provides opportunities to dematerialize the traditional fashion supply-chain model of garment production and distribution and maps the innovative shifts occurring in the fashion industry’s processes, products, and services. The adoption of 3DVD technologies by fashion companies unleashes new opportunities with respect to innovation in products/services and optimization of operational processes to streamline activities, shorten the lead time for designing, prototyping, manufacturing, marketing and retailing, and reorganizing the working phases. These capabilities also drive multicentred business-model innovations and thus affect value creation and delivery and capture changes. In addition, the analysis shows that digital transformation affects the four dimensions of sustainability that are interconnected intrinsically across supply-chain processes. Cultural sustainability is paramount, as fashion is a complex cultural system that is able to create products/services that influence the environment, economy, and society. In particular, 3DVD technologies promote cultural transformation of design processes to achieve a remix of skills and open knowledge, a behavioral shift from the consumer perspective in terms of diversity and self-expression, and a change in the organizational culture of companies that drive the digital transformation.