There are moments in fashion when a new color becomes important. There are moments when a silhouette changes, a fabric suddenly feels modern again, or an overlooked accessory becomes the object everyone wants. And then there are moments when the entire system changes. I believe we are living through one of those moments now.
The latest signal comes from WGSN, the global consumer trend-forecasting authority, which has identified “Joyful Audacity” as an emerging consumer emotion connected to its Future Consumer 2028 research.
The concept is compelling: faced with economic pressure, geopolitical instability, technological disruption and an increasingly exhausting digital environment, consumers will not necessarily retreat from joy. They may pursue it more deliberately. As WGSN describes the sentiment, this is not escapism or superficial positivity. It is joy employed almost defiantly—a combination of play, pleasure, creativity, connection and emotional release. That may sound philosophical. For fashion executives, designers, retailers and investors, it is anything but.
It could influence color, product, merchandising, store design, advertising, beauty, accessories, hospitality, digital experiences and the way brands build communities.
And it arrives at precisely the moment when forecasting has arguably never mattered more.
Fashion Is Entering a Great Reset
I have spent my career observing fashion from several sides of the table—as an editor, critic, educator and brand builder—and one lesson continually repeats itself: fashion businesses rarely fail because they cannot make products. They fail when they make products for a consumer who has already moved somewhere else. That distinction has become extraordinarily important in 2026.
Fashion is being disrupted simultaneously by trade policy, inflationary pressure, artificial intelligence, changing definitions of value and a consumer whose path to purchase increasingly begins somewhere entirely new. McKinsey and The Business of Fashion describe tariffs as the number-one hurdle confronting fashion executives in 2026. Their research also finds that consumers are becoming markedly more value-conscious while AI is changing product discovery, comparison and even purchasing itself. This is where I believe fashion leaders need to pay attention. The industry’s old map is becoming obsolete.
For decades, much of American fashion’s commercial machine depended upon a familiar equation: design in one market, manufacture in another, ship across oceans, sell through stores and websites, and communicate through advertising, celebrity, editorial and eventually social media. That equation is being rewritten.
America is experiencing a renewed political and commercial emphasis on domestic industrial capacity and manufacturing. At the same time, tariffs and geopolitical risk are forcing fashion companies to reconsider sourcing footprints. That does not mean the global supply chain disappears, nor does it mean every garment can or should suddenly be manufactured in the United States. But it does make Made in America, nearshoring, supply-chain diversification and regional production strategically relevant again.
McKinsey reports that US tariffs have already redrawn fashion’s trade maps, prompting businesses to change sourcing, pricing and efficiency strategies.
For American brands, domestic manufacturing can therefore represent more than patriotic storytelling. Depending on the product and economics, it can become part of a larger conversation surrounding supply-chain resilience, skilled employment, shorter transportation distances, traceability, speed-to-market and reduced exposure to certain international trade disruptions.
Sustainability, however, should never be assumed simply because something is locally manufactured. Material, energy, labor, transportation, durability and end-of-life considerations all matter. The opportunity is to build better and more transparent systems, not merely attach a flag to a label. That distinction matters enormously.
The AI Consumer Has Arrived
Then comes artificial intelligence. This, in my view, is where the transformation becomes truly extraordinary. For the past 20 years, fashion obsessed over the transition from stores to e-commerce and then from traditional media to social media. We learned SEO. We learned Instagram. We learned influencers. We learned TikTok. Now the consumer may increasingly ask an AI system:
Find me the best Italian leather loafer under $500.
Build me a wardrobe for a week in Paris.
What independent American menswear brands should I know?
Find a sustainable jacket that works for business and travel.
That changes everything.
McKinsey’s 2026 fashion research notes that consumers are already using large language models to search for products, compare alternatives and receive personalized recommendations. It argues that AI-assistant visibility is becoming a new frontier alongside traditional search optimization. Think about the implications.
The next great fashion gatekeeper may not be a department-store buyer, fashion editor, celebrity stylist, Instagram influencer or search engine. It could be an algorithm interpreting consumer intent. And this is precisely why forecasting becomes so valuable.
What Exactly Is WGSN?
For readers outside the industry, understanding WGSN is important because its influence often occurs long before consumers encounter the finished products.
WGSN was established in 1998, when brothers Marc and Julian Worth created Worth Global Style Network as an internet-based fashion intelligence and forecasting business. Contemporary reporting described the brothers as launching the company with their own capital before selling it seven years later to Emap.
Its timing was revolutionary. Fashion forecasting existed long before WGSN. Trend books, textile fairs, runway intelligence, street observation and specialist forecasting agencies had long helped designers determine future directions. The problem was speed.
WGSN recalls that the industry’s beautifully produced physical trend books could require months to compile and were inherently static. Its digital-first approach was designed to make forecasting faster and continually accessible; in its earliest days, the company even supplied computers to clients so teams could access the service. That sounds almost quaint today.
At the time, it was radical. Today WGSN has evolved far beyond fashion inspiration. Its intelligence extends across consumer insight, fashion, beauty, interiors, food and drink, sports and outdoor, and consumer technology, connecting macro cultural changes with increasingly specific product recommendations.
In my assessment, that evolution explains why WGSN matters more now than it did when trend forecasting primarily meant predicting colors and silhouettes. The question is no longer merely: What will people wear?The better question is: How will people live, what will they value, what will frighten them, what will excite them—and consequently, what will they buy?
Inside the Forecasting Machine
What impressed me while researching WGSN is the scale of the intelligence sitting behind the visual forecasts. Its methodology combines human expertise, proprietary datasets, third-party research, AI and analytical frameworks.
At the macro level, WGSN says it consults approximately 2,800 global third-party data sources. Its proprietary STEPIC framework evaluates change through six interconnected areas: Society, Technology, Environment, Politics, Industry and Creativity.
For product forecasting, WGSN describes what it calls the Five S’s: Social, Sentiment, Search, Shelf and Shows.
This is where forecasting begins to resemble an intelligence operation.
The company says its systems monitor more than 100,000 social posts monthly, consumer sentiment and clickstream behavior, years of search data, hundreds of millions of retail SKUs, and millions of catwalk, trade-show and street-style images. Human analysts then interpret those signals rather than leaving the decision entirely to algorithms.
For fashion design specifically, WGSN forecasts as far as five seasons ahead and says its TrendCurve AI model can reach 94% accuracy up to one year ahead for the forecasts it measures. That is a significant evolution from someone simply declaring, “I think green will be important next year.”
Why Small Brands Need Forecasting Too
There is sometimes a misconception that sophisticated forecasting belongs exclusively to billion-dollar corporations. I would argue that smaller businesses may need disciplined forecasting even more. A global conglomerate can survive a disappointing capsule collection. A young label ordering 5,000 units of the wrong jacket may not.
Forecasting can inform decisions surrounding color, silhouette, fabric, sizing, pricing, assortment depth, manufacturing quantities, campaign language, launch timing and geographic demand.
WGSN’s fashion-buying platform, for example, combines forecasting with predictive analytics designed to help buyers determine which trends to support, when to support them and how deeply to buy into them. Its TrendCurve AI analyzes categories including items, silhouettes, prints, colors and design details. That is not simply trend spotting. It is risk management. And in a market where inventory can destroy margins, that difference is crucial.
Joyful Audacity: Why This Forecast Matters
Which brings us back to Joyful Audacity.
The concept feels especially relevant because fashion has spent several years navigating seriousness: pandemic trauma, wars, inflation, political division, environmental anxiety and an endless digital stream of bad news.
WGSN’s wider research has already identified a movement toward playfulness and emotional release. Its 2026 macro trend “Unserious Everything,” for example, describes consumers seeking humor, irreverence and moments of release amid stress and tension. Joyful Audacity appears to push that emotional trajectory further.
WGSN’s message to brands is essentially this: do not manufacture fake happiness. Acknowledge reality—and create opportunities for people to experience something better within it. That might mean multisensory retail. Unexpected color. Humorous accessories. Scent. Music. Tactile materials. Creator collaborations. Physical gatherings. Community experiences.
Or products that allow consumers themselves to participate creatively rather than simply purchase passively. I find the idea particularly powerful for fashion because clothing has always been emotional technology. We dress for confidence. We dress for attraction. We dress for belonging. We dress for rebellion. We dress for memory.And sometimes we dress because the world feels impossibly heavy and putting on something magnificent makes the day feel lighter.
The Future Will Belong to Brands That Can Read the Signals
The fashion industry should treat this moment as a call to arms. Not politically. Strategically. Stop assuming yesterday’s consumer will return. Stop developing collections solely from historical sales. Stop thinking AI is merely a tool for generating campaign images. Stop treating manufacturing geography as an invisible back-office decision. Stop separating sustainability, technology, consumer psychology, product development and marketing into disconnected conversations.
They are becoming one conversation. WGSN’s Future Consumer work is particularly interesting because it argues that future purchasing behavior may increasingly be understood through emotions, beliefs and values rather than static demographic categories alone. Its 2028 forecasting methodology is designed specifically to map those evolving emotional trajectories. That may be one of the most important lessons fashion can absorb. The consumer of tomorrow is not simply “Gen Z,” “Millennial,” “luxury,” “mass” or “male.” People are more complicated than the boxes marketing departments have traditionally put them in.
My Takeaway
After examining WGSN and its forecasting ecosystem, what interests me most is not whether every prediction becomes reality exactly as described. Forecasting should never be confused with prophecy. Its real value is preparedness. It gives designers vocabulary. It gives buyers evidence. It gives marketers context. It gives executives scenarios.
And perhaps most importantly, it forces businesses to look beyond the next quarter. WGSN says its mission is to help companies create the right products at the right time by understanding where consumer behavior is heading. In 2026, that proposition feels unusually urgent. Artificial intelligence is changing discovery. Tariffs are changing sourcing. Economic pressure is changing value perception. Technology is changing work.
Consumers are reconsidering what deserves their money. American manufacturing is re-entering strategic conversations. And emotion itself is becoming an increasingly important commercial signal. Fashion has always been obsessed with what is new.
The companies that succeed in this next era, however, will need to become obsessed with something more difficult: what is next. And if WGSN’s Joyful Audacity forecast proves directionally correct, perhaps the future will not be defined solely by fear of disruption.
Perhaps consumers will answer disruption with creativity, humor, individuality and unapologetic pleasure. For fashion, that could be the most exciting forecast of all.
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