Upcoming Fashion Trends for 2024
Around the world, designers annually gather to share all of the new ideas and trends for the upcoming year at Fashion Week. All the trends in fashion for 2023-4 have been announced, yet people are still unsure of what they look like in day-to-day life. We’ll be taking a look into what fashion is looking like for the next year, in both casual and high fashion communities.
Fashion Week is a series of fashion events hosted around the world for designers and fashion houses to display their newest collections in a dedicated week. It’s typically used as a time to announce and observe the newest trends in fashion. Trendsetting designers around the world, small designers, models, and fashion aficionados alike all gather from around the world to engage in the world of couture. With more of an idea of the new collections for future seasons, we can observe everything new coming into the fashion scene.
Despite the constantly changing nature of fashion trends, there are some distinctive and timeless styles for the seasons. Particularly fall, which is characterized by warm colors, such as reds and browns, and plaid patterns. To match the typical climates of the season, fall fashion typically includes coats, boots, and hats. Meanwhile, spring and summer looks tend to be brighter and more pastel, with flowy fabrics and shorter clothing. It’s common to wear more dresses and less outerwear to fit the weather better during the warmer seasons.
However, to understand what we wear day-to-day, we must first understand what happens in high fashion. In the world of haute couture, the most notable, or ‘Big Four’ fashion weeks around the world are in New York, Paris, Milan, and London; which are what we’ll be focusing on in this article. New York Fashion Week tends to have more up-and-coming individual designers and American brands. Paris, Milan, and London Fashion Weeks have more well-known European designers and company-based images, as opposed to New York Fashion Week, which is more centered on the experimental styles of individual artisans. However, all four cohesively can inform us of incoming trends.
In New York Fashion Week, most brands announced their 2024 Spring/Summer (SS24) collections. Most designers created interesting textures with tulle, sequins, and distressed denim paired with bright colors. There were also many satin dresses—a full 180 from the more textured and bold designs. In Milan, designers showcased more metallic designs, sticking with a color palette of golds, silvers, and whites. However, one contrast color many designers did use was orange. The clothing materials were simpler and more one-dimensional. Other designers from the European brand Studio Milano used primarily pastels and more muted, darker hues of pink, green, and blue. London Fashion Week had more simple and day-to-day designs, with lots of bodycon and maxi dresses. The color palette was primarily neutral and metallic. Finally, Paris Fashion Week displayed lots of long designs, mainly in black and white with a singular complementary color.
So what can we do day-to-day to reflect these trends?
Vogue’s observations of New York Fashion Week concluded with some clear trends for the upcoming season. A constant trend among all the seasons is that 90s fashion has been making a comeback. In the fall, it specifically takes form in maxi skirts, silky blazers, sleek and buckled shoes, denim, and neutrals. The other extreme coming back into trend is bright and chunky statement sweaters, which contrast with the flowy and minimalistic materials of 90s fashion.
According to Pantone, the best colors for 2023-2024 from New York Fashion Week include mostly warm colors, such as Tender Peach, Rose Violet, Viva Magenta, Red Orange, Red Dahlia, and High Visibility (a bright yellow color), as well as cool colors, including Persian Jewel (a deep blue shade), Carnival Glass (a color similar to seafoam green), Burnt Sienna (a red-brown color), and Kohlrabi (a shade of green). The warm colors can be connected with autumn as they match the color of the leaves. Meanwhile, the cool colors take on a very different approach from last year, instead making outfits look more futuristic and avant-garde. As for the new classic colors for winter and autumn, minimalistic and more traditional colors, such as Coconut Milk, Eclipse (similar to black), Hot Fudge, Silver Birch (a light shade of gray), and Doe (a soft brown), are said to be re-contextualized this year.
In contrast, Pantone's colors last year during 2022-23 New York Fashion Week were bright rainbow colors. These included Lava Falls, Orange Tiger, Midnight, and Martini Olive, with an emphasis on pink, orange, and green colors. The colors that were chosen had very positive and optimistic connotations. Classic colors for autumn and winter were Arctic Wolf, Autumn Blonde, Polar Night, Loden Frost, and Chiseled Stone. These colors seemed to have a naturistic theme, focusing on the Arctic and its palette of cool and muted colors.
Fashion Week showed us a wide array of fashion from the world of haute couture, and we got to see trends of colors and textures that may start appearing in the upcoming year. Fashion is a unique art form because, unlike painting or photography, we live in it and it's constantly changing. With a shifting focus to eco-friendly and well-sourced materials, fashion is taking a different route from the past. But in the end, fashion is more than clothes we throw on or trends we observe from luxury designers, it’s a form of self-expression and it looks different for every person. So while Fashion Week may inform us of some trends we can predict or observe, fashion will follow its own route, based on how we all choose to approach it.