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The state of interactive digital technology is evolving rapidly and has shifted the ways in which customers shop dramatically. This trend heightens the need for research that examines the latest interactive digital technology tools adopted in fashion retailing. In response, the purpose of this paper was to examine fashion retailers’ incorporation of new interactive digital technology – in both online and offline retailing formats, and including new hybrid contexts – and its results in providing new experiential quality that contributes strongly to engage with customers.

The paper first reviews the literature and then proposes the research questions. This is followed by exploratory substantiation of those propositions with the findings from case studies that examined the new interactive digital technology implemented by six leading fashion retailers.

Various digital technology tools implemented in brick-to-click, click-to-brick and brick-and-mortar retailing offer customers a variety of experiential qualities that allow them to co-create products, engage in emotion-driven sensational and personalized shopping experiences and seamless shopping virtually, all of which derive from interactive digital technology implemented to enhance customer engagement.

This research examined the implementation of interactive digital technologies across the full spectrum of the fashion retail settings above. This paper makes an original contribution by adopting a customer-centric perspective and assessing the advantages technology provides to customer’s engagement quality in shopping, which differs from the traditional firm-centric perspective that views technology as a way to innovate retailers’ operations.

The history of weaving and textile innovation follows the history of technological innovations and the evolution of socio-cultural issues in a stepwise manner.

Currently, textiles and patterns are tools that characterize garments and define their unique aesthetics, becoming identity-making elements not only for a single product or a collection, but also for brands. By balancing a delicate equilibrium between brand heritage and Zeitgeist, the Italian textile industry bases its success on the capability to re-organize creative processes to generate innovation, also thanks to new relationships among textile designers and their customers. In particular, it is in the textile pattern development activity where we can find, on the one hand, interesting examples of product innovations through traditional tools, such as the company archives, and on the other hand, interesting examples of process innovations through new creative possibilities offered by high-tech fabrics.

Through special case studies, this essay will analyze and define possible creative models that innovate in the textile sector.