Knitwear is a booming growth segment for India’s garment export industry. As China shifts focus towards other more lucrative trades, production hubs in destinations like India, Vietnam and Bangladesh have an open floor to seize the opportunity. Apart from logistic and business reasons, the growth for knitwear’s demand can be also largely credited to the direction of fashion trends for the forthcoming seasons.
This wind of change towards athleisure and just more comfortable clothing in general is not a fad and the market is predicted to grow manifold in the coming years. Knitted apparel is a huge beneficiary of this movement and offers both functionality in terms of fit and fluidity with regard to cosiness at the same time.
The lifestyle shift towards ‘lounge meets work’ dressing is creating an entirely new focus on key wardrobe basics that are extremely multi-purpose in nature and put practicality above fashion. Expect traditional silhouettes and patterns made using high performance fibres to be the winners of the trend.
With heritage patterns like fair isle and retro geometrics backing the trend, family sized sweaters will mix both the idea and actual realization of comfort, while also spearheading the all-new ‘ugly fashion’ movement come next fall.
As more people start working remotely or from home and are only stepping out occasionally for meetings, clothing will need to be more transitional than ever. Light combination knits that require low maintenance and can be passed off for going out will dominate the growing fluid home-office lifestyles of the modern consumer.
While there is no denying that the highly profitable business of producing basic blanks, knitwear is becoming far from basic come next fall. As India’s power lies in value addition and creation of products that are a notch above the basic, here is a collation of some of the main fashion forward detail additions worth keeping in mind while designing knitwear for the coming seasons.
