As I wrap up my current role in the fashion tech industry, I want to compile an answer to explain what fashion tech is, to people outside the domain.
Why you haven’t heard of fashion tech
In marketing categorization, which classifies along the “who buy the goods” axis into 2 broad categories…
- Consumer goods - bought by consumers.
- Producer goods - bought by industries, producers.
Only consumer goods are public knowledge. Producer goods are typically only known to people inside the specific industry.
Along that axis, fashion tech is producer goods.
The people that buy them are fashion houses and designers. They buy the tech to produce (and sell) their fashion.
Broadly speaking though, any technology that helps produce fashion is fashion tech, regardless of whether it sits near designers or factories.
Fashion lifecycle and Technical Designing
My current work, as of today (2026-04-03), sits in the steps called Technical Designing.
A rough analogy: Fashion production lifecycle has 3 main steps.
- Art step, which is the Concept & Design in the above diagram
- Science step, which are the coloured steps above.
- Engineering step, which starts at manufacturing, after receiving the nested ‘blueprints’ from Technical Design.
Of course this is a very crude analogy. Technical Designing is very engineering-adjacent. It’s a practical and production-adjacent domain.
What happens in Technical Designing, after we strip down the “How it is done” away from “What needs to happen”, distills down to 3 critical steps in a loop. This loop is one of the critical bottlenecks in fashion lifecycle.
Pattern Grading
What needs to happen in Technical Designing, in terms of input and output, is:
- Technical Designing receives design as input
- Technical Designing needs to output “validated markers”.
The core requirement - clothing needs to fit. People who buy clothing expect to be able to wear it.
There are different margins of error that are allowed between different categories of fashion. The more exclusive ones are less forgiving than the others. The fitting must be precise.
That’s my current (wrapping up now) role in fashion tech - the fitting itself: Mathematical, Precise, and Unforgiving. The industry calls it Grading.
The industry standard uses the roundabout but manual node-displacement called “Grade Rules”.
But Grade Rules isn’t what needs to happen. It’s only the industry-standard way of how fashion design becomes target measurements.
At the forefront of fashion tech, different players are researching ways to achieve “specs-based Grading”, basically using measurements - the actual targets themselves - as the input to the solution, that automation that skips manual Grade Rules.
And the whole industry isn’t yet there.