Garment Semiotics

Following a brief from a global performance sportswear brand, we were asked to define what a market-leading lightweight jacket should be - functionally, culturally, and commercially - across three key markets. We designed a two-phase project combining AI-moderated interviews at scale with deep cultural and semiotic analysis. In the first phase, we mapped macro cultural shifts and translated them into category-specific opportunity territories, understanding how jackets are used and what they signal across performance and everyday contexts. In the second phase, we went deeper conducting tastemaker interviews with leading-edge consumers across the US, UK and Japan, alongside granular semiotic decoding of how lightweight jackets function as cultural signals through materials, silhouettes, branding codes and styling. The output gave the brand a clear, actionable definition of the future lightweight jacket: design principles, material and feature direction, branding codes, and a framework for how the category should sit across performance and lifestyle.