"It's time for a total reset and rethink": How the pandemic will redefine the future of fashion month
By Bev Malik
This morning, as expected, the British Fashion Council announced its move to a digital format for the forthcoming September Fashion Week shows which will merge both menswear and womenswear. LFW joins Shanghai Fashion Week amongst others, and it’s interesting to note that London Fashion Week was in fact the first to explore this format in previous seasons with the aim of accessing buyers and press who were not travelling to London for the shows. Once again London has shown the resourcefulness that marks so much of its culture. But rather than it being a temporary rescheduling in the fashion diary, might we see this as an opportunity to shift our entire way of producing and showcasing? I believe the Fashion Cycle was already turning into an anachronism and one that pronounced some of the very worst of wasteful, vapid consumer behaviours— a cycle that strained creative directors to churn out whole new directions at a relentless pace, one which facilitated the scourge of the markdown economy which, in turn, aided the industry to become one of the largest polluters on the planet. It’s time for a total reset and rethink, and not a temporary stop-gap before reverting to a type that simply does not work. With a world so severely disrupted by the pandemic – it is irresponsible to fight for and hold on to the old Modus Operandi with the fashion system. Here we track the shifts in the fashion calendar, and suggest where it could go now, to enable everyone in the industry (not just a few big brands in the fashion cycle) to thrive.
It’s important to remember that the fashion cycle has been challenged a number of times in the last decade, and is by no means a static entity. First came the resurgence of the resort market, which became a lucrative drop of product early in the season, and in the days of HNWI spenders jetting off to far flung destinations and in need of luxury, it became a drop that brought newness and a higher sell-through for retailers. As more and more brands tuned into the success and marketing potential of this drop, so came the exotic, jaw dropping shows from the likes of Chanel, Dior and Louis Vuitton. These resort shows were exclusive to upper echelons of the editorial world, but also ones that importantly engaged with the influencer economy. The impact of this economy as a positive, and at times frustrating disruptive force in the cycle, will be a key consideration in where we go next, and if our changes are going to work.
Resort shows and drops have sensibly contracted in their importance commercially. As a buying and retail consultant - I rigorously study consumer behaviour at luxury level – it has long frustrated me that resortwear drops down in stores in London or New York when the first snow hits. We have a suite of big department stores globally who buy extremely similarly, with little nuance between them, and who doggedly stick to the same detrimental behaviours that are now challenging (I hope not permanently) their very reason for being. Unfortunately it has taken them a pandemic to see that the vision of sherbet pink voile dresses in store in January – jars with most people, especially when you cannot find a coat. This has long been met with a mix of amusement and consternation with many customers who do not show up in algorithms, landing a few messages that none of us wanted in retail: firstly that we lack authority and are out of touch with the real desires of possible clients, or that we just cater to an Asian millennial market: that fashion is not for everyone, that fashion doesn’t care about what you just bought in October as it is worth only 30% of what it was then. I have raised these concerns for the past 6 years with key industry figures – only to be met with a bafflement as to why I was asking. A favourite and oft repeated line from buyers has been – ‘the customer wants newness’ failing to spot the opportunity for ‘relevance’ rather than ‘newness’. Luxury retail has failed to tell the story of each garment in store, to lend experience and service to the customer, and match the energy of the online experience. Let the new fashion week focus on reviving these stores and bring them very decisively into the conversation about what we need to showcase in a fashion week.
We need to repurpose the role of the influencer in the fashion cycle and calendar. Is the reworking of the digital fashion week calendar an opportunity for the influencers within the industry to actually align with product to buy in store - rather than outlandish catwalk pieces which are some 6 months (possibly even more now) away from delivery? I sincerely hope so. I believe that influencers will have a key part to play in the next chapter on how effective or not the shift in the fashion calendar is going to be. I would like to see them work with retailers first and foremost - and then brands in a more relevant and meaningful way. Perhaps they can work with archival pieces from designers and stores, available now – not with gifts or for catwalk only pieces no one will produce. It is to the credit of each influencer that they have been charged with showing us how to wear our collections – yet, in my view, very few seem to show how to make a piece work as an actual wardrobe piece, rather than a street-style image. The influencer in the new digital format should be more than entertainment or distraction – street style had become a fashion week all of its own – a commercial platform. As an industry, we need to engage them in more rigorous ways to define how they can support the whole industry’s needs in this time of crisis. It is, in a sense, a wakeup call for the influencers and an important call to action.
Another shift in the calendar has been the exciting disruptiveness of capsule collections dropped, most commonly, by sportswear collaborations. These drops have added a buzz of excitement, and given retailers a much-needed boost whereby they don’t have to commit to entire collections, but rather core products (if these work and sell through, they can be editioned in a different colour, fabric or look.) These drops have extremely little to do with the traditional fashion week format and could be harnessed extremely well by the digital fashion week format.
The digital format offers the opportunity to expand story telling for each brand. Fashion film, a great lookbook or website, and a brand message can all captivate. I disagree with others who feel the pandemonium of a fashion show is no more than a buzz that tells us very little about the brand or clothes. The show engages creatives from set design, through to music, makeup and styling. These are all accessible and even more thrilling digitally – and the new fashion weeks should aim to connect even more deeply with the sattelites of the industry to drill down and give editors and buyers an experience they will be thrilled by and engaged with. Rihanna’s Fenty show in New York showed us just what happens when an iconic entertainer meets fashion with Amazon. The format was disruptive, engaging and all accessible online. It told a story and it gave the brand message in a way that is truly memorable. More to the point, Fenty has worked with a different idea outside the fashion cycle which enables the brand to move at different paces through the year. It is not dictated to by a calendar as such. It also revises key shapes and products— not reinventing the design wheel each time for the sake of ‘newness’ rather it’s a design process of evolution.
What the fashion weeks show from here on will to a large extent also depend on what they can show, what they ‘should’ show. Last season’s fall shows gave us an inkling that the shift was moving decisively towards concerns about the environment. If I think of last season, I think of that apocalyptic vision of the world shown by Balenciaga. I felt at the time that this was one of the last fashion shows of that type: where the world’s woes and forest fires were being dramatised and commercialised, but also acutely observed. Waste and sustainability remain a huge concern for the industry at large. This morning I spoke with my colleagues in Italy – who are working out how to get back to work. I learned that some of the big brands have soft opened their ‘style and development’ departments today. I also learned that other brands are inviting their staff to work more now and take only a weeks holiday in August to catch up with the backlog of production. I share their concerns that leather hides— if not treated in time— will go to waste and the reams of fabric that have not been cut and sewn, or have been cancelled by irresponsible retailers, will not be reused. I rather dream of the forthcoming digital fashion week to be one where we have to reuse all of the dead stock fabric, and create or reimagine the pieces responsibly. Perhaps this dream will come true. We come to the creative struggle that has become so toxic in this industry: we dispose too easily of ‘old’ stock. There is a big campaign to discount sell current season stocks to get liquidity for brands, but also to engage an ostensibly poorer customer. The forthcoming digital showcases should address these issues head on in their collections. If the digital format can not only use old stock but also tell the story of how their brand’s products are made and conceived, this will be a great advance for our whole industry, that a live show cannot offer. I would love to see this continue long after the pandemic subsides.
An important caveat of this shift to digital is that buyers fundamentally need to see products in order to judge if they fit or work for their clients. It may be the case that each brand can explore ways of showing the product virtually and working with socially-distanced showrooms, or sample movement in order to support the stores to make the right choices for them. I rather suspect that useful platforms such as JOOR will become very important in this regard. If retailers can work together with brands and use their numbers in more revealing ways, we may discover we are delivering better product to our customer than the previous market weeks allowed us to.
Wherever we are headed after the digital shows, we should be clear that we cannot head backwards to show formats that — to use Marc Jacobs words – were ‘exhausting’. We cannot judge new designers by invented inflexible standards — create 20 looks on a runway or your ideas will not be communicated to the rest of the world. We have an opportunity to dig deep and collectively decipher who we are as an industry. The time is now, and this is a wheel that must be reinvented.