FaST – Fashion Sensing Technology is a project meant to design, experiment with, and implement an ICT tool that could monitor and analyze the activity of Italian emerging Fashion brands on social media. FaST aims at providing SMEs in the Fashion industry with the ability to better understand and measure the behaviours and opinions of consumers on social media, through the study of the interactions between brands and their communities, as well as support a brand’s strategic business decisions.

After a crisis that deeply hit Western economies and revealed the weaknesses of previous paradigms, the current challenge – for a mature sector like Fashion – is to reconnect social communities with their territories and their material culture. The tremendous potential created by a new generation of technologies—including digital production, social media and IoTs—offers powerful tools to pursue these goals.

Given the importance of Fashion as an economic and cultural resource for Lombardy Region and Italy as a whole, the project aims at leveraging on the opportunities given by the creation of an hybrid value chain fashion-digital, in order to design a tool that would allow the codification of new organizational models. Furthermore, the project wants to promote process innovation within the fashion industry but with a customer-centric approach, as well as the design of services that could update and innovate both creative processes and the retail channel which, as of today, represents the core to the sustainability and competitiveness of brands and companies on domestic and international markets.

FaST – Fashion Sensing Technology is a project supported by Regione Lombardia through the European Regional Development Fund (grant: “Smart Fashion & Design”). The project is being developed by Politecnico di Milano – Design dept. and Electronics, Information and Bioengineering dept. – in collaboration with Wemanage Group, Studio 4SIGMA, and CGNAL.