Mare di Moda presents seven Spring/Summer 2022 trends filled with possibilities for a resilient future. Narratives of hope, positive choices, creativity and self-expression, featuring on longer-lasting products and sustainability.
Tech optimist
Believing in technological progress and having faith that science and technology will help humanity build a better future, making our lives healthier, comfortable and connected while creating opportunities for the next generation. Performance textiles are humanised through the warm Mars hues of iron oxide, utilitarian uniform green, spacesuit white and a range of human skin shades.
- Fabrics: performance textiles that are sustainable and lightweight, offering non-restrictive compression systems, breathability and thermal regulation. Fabrics empower self-confidence and improved posture with smart sculpting and contouring, without sacrificing comfort. Look for the comfort of basic plain or printed swim and underwear knits that are smart, soapy and matte as well as with subtle sheen. Wellness-enabling athleisure tracksuits, tops and leggings use foamy and voluminous utility fleeces, offering shelter and softness and adding cushiony softness through padding and quilting.
- Patterns: organic pigment swirls, ink marls and dye storms, leaving traces of dust, erosion, wind and water flows. Camouflage motifs reference nature’s skins, scales and bark. They can also show organic pattern through biotech dyeing processes using living systems, like bacteria.
- Silhouettes: functional and comfortable styles make versatile layers of single or composed garments with removable parts. Tech textiles enable modest and super lightweight swim hijabs, tunics and leggings and comfortable utilitarian base layers, plain functional swimwear as well as parachute-inspired draping and gathering, using tunnels and knotted lacing.
Brutal beauty
Highlighting potential for creative solutions to provide individuals with control in a turbulent and unpredictable world, this trend is all about slow and essential products. High-performance armour offers protection as well as emotional empowerment in garments that express fearlessness, confidence and inclusivity. Timeless and gender-neutral with a variety of greys, blacks and whites.
- Fabrics: protective layers that are coated, laminated and leather-like or sturdy, dry to the touch and cottony. For swim and intimate wear the focus is placed on raw mesh and netting and tulle with a melted surface look, plain armour and leather-like surfaces, of raw marks, laser cut holes and nicks or plissés and rugged pile surfaces. Finish off with tough trims and laces.
- Patterns: prints are timeless, versatile and inclusive. From subtle signs of wear to raw paint bomb, ink blot and destroyed surface effects, iridescent metallic and prismatic sheen, sprayed and printed activist quotes and markings. Garments can be overprinted, covering seams and stitches.
- Silhouettes: shapes that are sturdy and powerful. Hybrid versatile swim and activewear, from quiet and utilitarian to the engineered with brutal details and finishes. Finish off with lacing, trims, belts and bones, mesh inserts and dramatic laser cut ornaments.
Rewild
Embracing elements of primitive living to disconnect us from the comforts and trappings of modern consumerist society and launch us into the savage world of untamed nature. Rewild focuses on the organic aesthetics of nature infused design that is wild and poetic, raw and calming. The pattern and colour symbiosis celebrates nature’s resources and processes, with marls, low impact and craft dying processes in raw, greige, undyed and unbleached shades.
- Fabrics: material innovation is crucial to realising a new way forward. Can we find sustainable, agile and inventive ways to grow and process our favoured fundamental cotton fibres? Or can we explore forgotten crops like hemp, jute, linen and sisal? For trims and fringing, choose simple and pure materials like cane, raffia and straw.
- Patterns: these wild and pure fabrics are mostly plain or have natural colour, with some crafted details such as embroidery, stitches, crochet and macramé.
- Silhouettes: sober and minimalist, letting the materials lead. Muted patchwork shows natural colour harmonies for a more poetic swimwear approach and swim cover-ups presenting materials in their purest form.
Tomorrowland
One key driving force towards a positive future is confident creativity, exciting and empowering young crowds and individuals and propelling them towards an eventful future. A festival mix from electric synthetics to bio-luminescent acids and kawaii pastels, the colours are amplified when positioned alongside shades as dark as night.
- Fabrics: a creative clash between the digitally printed and physically crafted. Crafting with offcuts, waste and dead-stock material to produce sensational, artful patterns. Embracing digital technology to print real fabrics as well as sustainably developing digital-only textiles.
- Patterns: spiced with humour, from electrifying digital colour explosions, artful handmade abstracts to lush jungle vegetation and animal skin patterns. Overdyed and overprinted existing textiles show irregular colour gradients and wild marls.
- Silhouettes: shapes are curvaceous and sensual for swim and intimate. Bikinis and pretty triangle bra tops, waist-high swim briefs that are sexier than strings, while intimate slips go micro.
Rejoice
Encouraging people to hold onto things a little longer to personalise or adapt items when they are worn out, to mend and repair, to love and look after garments. This trend introduces historical collections to a new generation, keen to connect the past to the future, in a vintage colour palette. Finding innovative ways to build colour and material stories from existing and organic resources.
- Fabrics: cherry-picking materials based on availability, using what exists. Stimulating ad hoc DIY fabrication and finishing with creatively repaired, rejuvenated and hacked vintage garments. There is a strong feel for retro and nostalgic design with a revival of badges and appliqués, vintage team jerseys, college uniform details plus cartoon heroes and pop music merchandise memorabilia.
- Patterns: patchwork, crochet quilting and repair using decorative indigenous techniques as Japanese boro and shasiko stitching and Indian kantha quilting. Collage and assemblage are used for pattern design as well as garment making. Nostalgic retro patterns are micro printed along with jacquard colour wovens for swim and tops.
- Silhouettes: retro and random, repurposing existing styles to spice them up by using collage techniques. Favouring imperfection, classing co-ordinations and the accidental. Retro tracksuits inspire trimmed side-zipped pants and contrasting trimmed t-shirts and tops.
Radical romance
Authenticity, craft and heritage are once again celebrated. Let’s revisit brand archives and explore patterns and motives never seen in a fashion context – rather in vintage blankets, quilts, wallpapers and padded, flowery bed covers – creating the next generation of heirlooms from heirlooms. A romantic and poetic palette features flowery pastels with a patinated antique flavour, colours that have been tainted by time and aged with grace.
- Fabrics: the radical aspect is the rejection of new for the sake of it. Finding inspirations in heirloom textiles and arts and crafts archives with the goal to create swim and intimate garments with a meaningful narrative and intrinsic emotional value. Antique jacquards, heritage embroideries, vintage crochet qualities, bed quilts and Richelieu lace all inspire. Decorative appliqués and 3D flowers, lace and crochet detailing.
- Patterns: open the treasure chest to find chintzy curtain florals, upholstery Gobelins and wallpaper blooms. Rely on archival patterns for authenticity, spanning tattoo blossoms, Hawaiian patterns, Victoriana, Caucasian and Himalayan flower patterns, souvenir prints and Toile de Jouy. Also vintage heirloom pyjama bottoms, colour woven and Breton striped knits.
- Silhouettes: frivolous intimates and swim garments that reveal crafted details or simple shapes for minimal as well as ornate floral patterns. Preference is shown the comfortable, like sedate straight-cut shorts, classical men’s pyjamas, flowery boxers as well as t-shirts.
Postmodernist
Living in tumultuous times, design goes on the offensive to provide escape and promote invention. Timeless, utilitarian garments are injected with humour, decorated with bold graphics. Unpretentious and appealing design offers honest and unapologetic aesthetics in a bold and confident colour palette in primary saturated tones.
- Fabrics: focus on the basics, the familiar and the proven in plain, functional and versatile hybrids, fit for any sport and relaxed leisure usage. For these utilitarian evergreens, we need to search for eco-conscious solutions, finding ways for products to be remade and biodegrade, or for recyclable garments made of waste.
- Patterns: bold pattern combinations are Memphis-inspired and post-modernist, showing compositions of striking spots, stripes, dashes in bright shades alongside black and white. Patterns are rhythmic and repetitive, cut and scrambled, collaged and assembled, text moves away from logos towards meaningful and sincere activist statements, positive quotes and icons. Supersize abstracts and bold figurative colour blockings are artful.
- Silhouettes: simple and bold, classic and timeless – it’s all about purpose. There is a tendency towards co-ordinates, combing multiple garments to layer and alternate for intimate/swim/active hybrids.
