The Print Sourcing Guide for Women’s Autumn/Winter 2023/24 emphasises the key directions for womenswear, focusing on the latest trends in ready-to-buy prints.
These include painterly florals, creative brushstrokes, and conversationals with home and garden motifs.
Here’s a summary of the guide:
Digital vs In-Person: Print studios are adapting to the “new normal” by balancing digital galleries with in-person trade shows. While there’s optimism about clients wanting in-person meetings, there’s also a trend towards working with clients online and optimising digital interfaces.
Buying Habits: Clients are seeking collections for both fall and summer seasons simultaneously, focusing on purchasing for immediate needs rather than long-term planning. Trans-seasonal trends and prints that offer longevity are important for more conscious purchasing habits.
Artistic Aesthetics: Hand-rendered artworks, expressive brushstrokes, and creative prints are popular. Jack Jones Design has noted a significant return to abstraction in recent months.
Digital Printing: Studios are encouraged to leverage digital fabric printing for its efficiency and environmental benefits. It reduces water usage by 95% and energy usage by 75%, according to the Digital Fabric Printing report.
Collaboration: Partnering with print studios can help achieve the trends outlined in the guide using modern, efficient methods like digital fabric printing.
In summary, the guide highlights a shift towards a maximalist, creative approach in women’s fashion prints, the blending of digital and in-person methods in print sourcing, and a focus on sustainable, efficient practices in print production.
Latest trends in ready-to-buy prints
Watercolour Florals: Soft watercolour techniques with oversized, playful florals in bright tones on dark grounds, appealing to various clothing categories like dresses, occasion wear, and activewear.
Autumn Foliage: Inspired by nature, with prints featuring fall leaves, soft florals, and foliage in autumnal tones like candied orange, terracotta, and intense rust.
Puzzle Piece: Playful, spliced geometric shapes that create puzzle-like patterns. These abstract jigsaw patterns provide a fresh take on geometric prints.
Home Comforts: Interior-inspired icons like chairs, vases, and teapots provide cosy, homey motifs. This trend appeals to the desire for comfortable, familiar designs.
Serene Brushstrokes: Pastel watercolours, soft painterly effects, and wavy brushstrokes create calming, abstract prints. These subtle designs evoke a sense of rest and restoration.
Glamour Florals: Realistic, rich colours on dark grounds form glamorous, oversized clusters of florals. Digital printing allows for a more environmentally friendly approach to creating these prints.
Stripe Play: Fresh takes on perennials with artful, preppy stripes and checks. Layered stripes and overlaid screens provide a modern twist on classic designs.
Supernatural: Blends nature and technology for an otherworldly aesthetic with underwater, electric colours creating a glow-in-the-dark effect. Ideal for partywear and occasion wear.
Horticool: Garden-inspired motifs include delicate stems, vegetables, and trellis-like repeats, often printed on organic bases with natural inks and dyestuffs.
Kaleidoscope: Geometric, shape-shifting patterns create a kaleidoscopic effect. This trend can be used for partywear and youth-oriented designs.
Virtual Rave: Blurry, high-contrast prints with neon colours mimic metaverse aesthetics. This trend leans towards digital fabric printing for its benefits in water and energy consumption.
These trends reflect a mix of traditional and digital methods, focusing on sustainability, comfort, and boldness in colours and patterns.
This guide provides a comprehensive direction for A/W 23/24 women’s fashion, offering a variety of innovative and expressive prints.
Benefits of Digital Fabric Printing
Digital fabric printing offers a host of benefits. It allows digital fabric printing companies to reduce their setup costs and respond quickly to customers’ demands.
It also enables customers the flexibility of ordering smaller print runs with a variety of designs limited only by their imagination.
At Digital Fabric Solutions we only use eco-friendly dyes and chemicals from reputable multinationals while our effluent treatment plant purifies water before discharge. This ensures our processes are sustainable and eco-friendly.
We have a range of fabrications that tie in with current global trends. These include a range of cotton and polyester fabric bases.
Our key strength and competitive advantage as market leaders include the the vibrancy of colour we engineer.
Our vibrancy of colour yield on our fabrics is unmatched in the market.
- Visit our showroom in Durban or Cape Town to take a closer look at our fabric bases or we can courier a sample pack to your doorstep. Contact us!
