Runway's Revolution: How Going Digital Is Changing Fashion Week

Designers are questioning whether it makes sense to show so often at fashion weeks in a digital world.
Monday 3 August 2020
Brazillian designer Francisco Terra of Neith Nyer declared he only wants to show once a year. Photo: AFP
Spanish designer Alejandro Palomo questions the cost behind fashion shows. Photo: AFP

 

Terra, one of a wave of young designers to have broken onto the Paris catwalk in recent years, said that from now on he would only show once a year, “maybe twice”. He is definitely not the only designer. Spanish wunderkind Alejandro Palomo told AFP that he is not sure if costly Paris shows really work for him while Colombian Esteban Cortazar said he has turned his back on them for now. “I love the shows,” Palomo said, “but I am not going to put the pressure on my body of having to do one” every few months.

 

Shows ‘outmoded’

 

 

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We were getting calls. I’m sure everyone was, writes BoF’s Tim Blanks. The coronavirus had hit fashion hard. There was a bush telegraph of nervous designers looking for any kind of reassurance against a growing tide of bad news. It was obvious that independent designers were going to be hit hardest. For those on a shoestring, it just got thinner. For those who were more established, querulous retailers and landlords were the challenge. Fashion has traditionally been an industry of secrets, but the virus made a nonsense of that. It was time for people to talk openly to each other. BoF facilitated a conversation, via Zoom, that brought dozens of independent designers and storeowners together. In bi-weekly digital gatherings over the past month – a whole patchwork of faces from all over the world – these designers and retailers hashed out a game plan for the future. In one way, it was purest logic. The fashion calendar – the showing, selling and shipping of clothes – divorced itself from common sense a long while ago. The rhythm of fashion’s seasons was surreally disconnected from the seasons as most of the world understood them. You’d go to buy a winter coat when the mercury dropped and all you’d find was bikinis. Irrational this was, but unquestioned, thanks in large part to the commercial might of American department stores whose tune the industry danced to. So, here were a few screens full of faces prepared to challenge the timetable, to create a new reality out of that old surreality, now turned to ashes by Covid-19. It hasn’t been easy. How could there be consensus with so many different wants and needs on the table? But, sure enough, a proposal on how to rewire the fashion calendar took shape. For me, says Blanks, the most important thing has been the communication. People who knew of each other but had never met are now talking across the globe. The future is collaboration not competition. That’s also how revolutions are made. Fashion needed one, and if it took a dreadful virus to create the conditions for change, that is surely just a measure of how great the need for revolution has been. Read the proposal at rewiringfashion.org #rewiringfashion

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Source: AFP Relax News