KEY TAKE -AWAYS INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY
A GLIMPSE OF PREMIÈRE VISION PARIS PITCH & TALK SESSIONS. SEPTEMBER 2026
Great ideas deserve to go further. Fresh perspectives, emerging innovations, inspiring experiences: the talks and pitches at Première Vision Paris brought to light the transformations already shaping the future of fashion. At the heart of this edition, Innovation & Technology sparked conversations, brought different perspectives together and opened up new avenues for exploration. We’ve curated the standout ideas, experiences and insights worth remembering. An editorial digest designed to capture what was shared, extend the conversation and inspire what comes next.
TALK
A glimpse of Première Vision Paris talk sessions
The Digital Decade:: Navigating What’s Next For Fashion Speakers: | Carla Buzasi, CEO of WGSN Group | Ben Hanson, Editor-inChief of The Interline
« An operational choice is: next year I need to improve my margin or diversify my material sources. A strategic choice is: what kind of company, what kind of brand are we? The same logic has to be applied before choosing a technology today: how does IA fits our activity? » Ben Hanson, editor-in-chief of The Interline
To open the Innovation & Technology programme, Première Vision Paris brought together two longstanding observers in an unusual co-interview format: Carla Buzasi, who heads WGSN and its 51,000 clients in 94 countries, covering everything from the great shifts in consumption to the « ingredients » of the product itself, and Ben Hanson, who has spent sixteen years analysing the links between fashion and technology at The Interline. Be subject to technology, or steer it For Ben Hanson, our relationship with technology is generational. Those who grew up before the internet
see it as a revolution and a force for good; younger people, born with a smartphone in hand, are more ambivalent, caught between taking ubiquitous tech for granted and distrusting it when it threatens values and jobs. The sense of being left behind cuts across every generation, so rapid is the pace of change. To counter that feeling, the experts advise finding one area in which to be an early adopter, so as to drive change rather than submit to it. In fashion, that might be a new design or image-generation tool. Carla Buzasi points out, however, that fashion unlike other industries likes to take its time adopting new tools, and then stays loyal to them... And according to WGSN, it is a long way from up to speed on AI. Telling fads from trends Trends are not accelerating, Carla argues, but they are becoming more visible. TikTok is awash with passing crazes, or «fads», which only last if they answer a genuine need. Yet while tools can become trends on social media, the use of AI is structural: «it is not going anywhere, and it will only grow». Ben Hanson backs the point by recalling the lesson of 2020, and the contrast with the NFT and metaverse bubble. Meta may have bet on their rise, but they were never structural for other sectors. That sets them radically apart from the lasting change AI is bringing, which brands need to absorb today. AI adoption is starting at both ends of the value chain A survey by The Interline of around a hundred fashion professionals shows that AI is finding its way into the start of the product journey (market analysis, moodboards, briefs, concept visualisation) and its end (consumer-facing presentation, e-commerce). At the heart of development, such as for patternmaking and technical engineering, trust is still lacking. For consumers, transparency comes first: WGSN was labelling its AI-generated images long before Meta made it compulsory. Luxury, for its part, is winning by
putting craft back in the spotlight. In the mass market, efficiency is welcome when it makes shopping easier, as with Zara’s size recommendations. AI or no AI, expertise and reputation remain essential, witness the catwalk dashboard launched the same day by WGSN to help buyers and merchandisers decide. That piece of work, accelerated by AI, rests on thirty years of images tagged by experts. «Humans at the beginning, AI in the middle, humans at the end», as Carla Buzasi puts it. What can we expect by 2030? Ben Hanson expects spreadsheets and software to fade away. Carla Buzasi is betting on the return of communities, in a world still marked by Covid. AI will also allow three-person brands to operate like large organisations. Creativity and taste will remain the preserve of the human. On markets, going international now means looking towards China, Singapore or Thailand, and this «EastEast» shift calls for a specific understanding of each local consumer. And finally, for brands still wondering where to start, Ben Hanson advises thinking about AI tools use case by use case, and defining the expected ROI clearly, rather than trying to «put AI» everywhere.
« Consumers are smart. Treat them as such and they will reward you. Treat them as idiots and they will go and buy elsewhere. » Carla Buzasi, CEO of WGSN Group
TALK
A glimpse of Première Vision Paris talk sessions
Doing Good Doesn’t Mean Giving Up Doing Well Speaker: | Gabriele Verikaite, Head of Business Development of Solena Materials Moderator: | Ben Hanson, Editor-inChief of The Interline
« Think back to your first pancake. It was a failure, while your grandmother turned out one after another effortlessly. Innovation is the same. The first one is never brilliant; you have to accept that and proceed by iteration, with resilience and humility. » Gabriele Verikaite, Head of Business Developmentof Solena Materials
The eternal dilemma for brands: reducing impact without sacrificing economic performance, against ever more demanding profitability targets. But can sustainability, invariably seen as a cost, be an investment in the future? Ben Hanson put the question to Gabriele Verikaite of Solena Materials, a London biotech start-up using AI to design protein-based textile fibres. High-performing, oilfree and biodegradable, they are presented as an alternative to polyester and nylon, and as both environmentally and economically virtuous for brands. Sustainability: a «nice to have» to be dropped, or a brand’s founding pillar? For Gabriele Verikaite, brands broadly take two approaches to sustainability. Most treat it as a regulatory constraint and a marketing opportunity, adopting the language without the substance and allocating budgets that evaporate in a downturn. A handful of brands, where the conviction usually comes from the top, make it a fundamental pillar inseparable from the business. She mentions Stella McCartney, which has brought design, compliance and sustainability together in a single «living organism» from the outset. The brand accepts, for
instance, paying higher customs duties to export a plant-based leather alternative rather than animal leather from Italy to the United States, a precise illustration of what is blocking virtuous practice from scaling: the «green tax». Eco-designed materials and products are expensive, and the «green premium» does not pay, because consumers are not willing to spend more for it. From technical innovation to techno-ecolo-nomic innovation Innovation has done a great deal for brands’ economic performance and for product versatility. Polyester leads the field, and Ben Hanson is always happy to remind audiences how revolutionary it was. For decades, synthetics democratised the school uniform and the sports jersey, this until we began to measure the impact of microplastics on our health, and the environmental consequences of extracting and processing the material... «We innovated very fast, it was wonderful, but today we are up against a wall», says Gabriele Verikaite. Since the pandemic, the task has been to «innovate better»: newcomers have to build in techno-economic analysis and lifecycle analysis from the start, water, energy, carbon, end of life. Falling back on natural fibres is no magic shortcut: they remain exposed to climate volatility and to swings in raw material prices, as shown by the tens of millions of euros luxury groups have invested in soil regeneration to secure their supply. Reversing the creative process and designing the material for the product Where brands choose a fabric on the strength of trend forecasts and then fit a product to it, Solena reverses the logic. Spun out of Imperial College London four years ago and co-founded by Dr James MacDonald, the start-up designs new textile fibres from computationally modelled proteins. Its first partner, a major brand, faced two compounding problems: a great deal of synthetics, hard to recycle, and no natural material tested over ten years that could meet both its performance and its price requirements. Solena co-developed the material, successfully delivering against a specification that included biodegradability, moisture management and odour control. 2015–2025: a graveyard of textile innovations? Many are the start-ups that raised 50 or 100 million euros… and then disappeared. Their milestones, dictated by fundraising rounds, took no account
« Every investment in innovation is money down the drain, until the external environment shifts in its favour. It is like buying an umbrella in fine weather: it looks like a bad investment, until it rains. » Ben Hanson, Editor-in-Chief of The Interline
of the uncertainties of science or of the long timescales of R&D: «you cannot ask a microbe to make a perfect material». Leather alternatives, for example, have come up against centuries of optimised tanning processes and mastery of hide work. Gabriele Verikaite stresses the importance of the learning curve and of iteration, and of market timing in making room for innovation. Ben Hanson recalls the example of virtual 3D sampling: a gimmick before Covid, it became decisive when samples could no longer travel. Both advise large brands to move quietly where they can, out of a concern for integrity rather than communication. As for small brands, they are not left behind: they can access new materials through intelligent partnerships between innovators and manufacturers.
TALK
A glimpse of Première Vision Paris talk sessions
When Technology Shapes the Silhouette: From 3D Printing to Material Craftsmanship Speakers: | Victor Clavelly, designer and special guest of this edition | Mayeul Deveaux, Art Director - CGI, CGI Department - SLASH OFFICE | Raoul Joseph, Art Director - Technical Department SLASH OFFICE Moderator: | Matthieu Guinebault, journalist at FashionNetwork
« There was a time when I saw printing as an almost sacred stage of the process, and I would spend forever refining my models… Today I experiment very fast, and that is how you learn.» Victor Clavelly, designer and special guest of this edition
A sometimes overlooked innovation, 3D printing offers brands and young designers a way to combine tech and craft. Victor Clavelly, a rising designer, and Mayeul Deveaux and Raoul Joseph, founders of the 3D printing studio SLASH OFFICE, examine how far the method has come and where its limits lie. Victor Clavelly was not headed for fashion design but for character design in the video game industry. It was at the École Duperré that he began a fashion course, he now teaches there. For his 2020 graduation he had no access to the premises because of the pandemic, so he decided to model his collection digitally and used a 3D printer to bring it into being. That was the start of a passion he went on to develop and share on social media. The buzz it generated led to collaborations with Rick Owens, Beyoncé, FKA twigs and Katy Perry. Today the designer shares premises with SLASH OFFICE: a genuine «gathering of nerds», where they experiment with the technology together. What creative possibilities do 3D printers offer today? During the talk, Victor Clavelly’s collection Les Fragments is shown on screen: garments with a textured mesh, accessories, footwear… A range of products can be made, in multiple colourways, from the resin modelled by the printers. «The key is to test. To understand how models can be varied, the textures… Machines and software are very userfriendly these days; you can handle development and production with three months’ experience», insists Mayeul Deveaux. The only constraint: the size of the machines, which caps how large the designs can be.
Victor Clavelly has no set creative process beyond experimentation and commissions from brands or artists. «What I like doing, and this comes from character design, is imagining the person wearing the outfit, the world they live in… otherwise I just test. There was a time when I saw printing as an almost sacred stage of the process, and I would spend forever refining my models… Today I experiment very fast, and that is how you learn.» He increasingly combines these 3D creations with materials such as leather. Can you build a brand on 3D printing? The three are clear on the fact that it is social media that allows them both to keep watch on the industry and to make their work known. Which can feel «strange» to Victor Clavelly, who acknowledges the oddity of depending on algorithms but is delighted by the opportunities they have brought him. It is the same story at SLASH OFFICE, which has worked with Nike and Lacoste on keyrings and merchandise. On scaling, Victor Clavelly has no advice to give: he remains committed to a craft approach and has little appetite for building a more conventional business. That said, nothing prevents a brand from producing series with these machines, quite the opposite. Some limits do frustrate the three guests, notably the fact that current resins are plasticbased. «The industry is working on biomaterials and making good progress, but for now they remain difficult to print. There is also a lot of 3D printing in ceramic, metal and silicone…» Whatever the innovations, they intend to experiment with them, in fashion as in other fields.