The British Fashion Council’s (BFC) first foray into the territory of exclusively virtual industry screens, a magazine-style electronic platform that hosts the content of more than 120 of its creators, whether directly placed and incorporated from other media platforms, has not been an unreserved success. Well, it’s not based on critics of the fast-shot press lamenting the lack of live rumors, new collections and largely low-fidelity content.
But to compare the initiative, a quick virtual reaction to Covid’s mute silence of his annual June men’s fashion exhibitions, created while the peak of production is still in stasis, compared to a formula inherited from fashion shows that already feel as temerated in a seasonless world. entry as an entertainment set and where many megabrands already advocate a decentralized fashion calendar, means lacking a strategic vision for the future.
According to Stephanie Phair, President of the CFB: “Regardless of its imperfection, one will have to think of a whole new world of new possibilities, not what fashion looked like, because the truth is that everything has changed, and fashion cannot live any longer. a vacuum cleaner.”
Lynne Murray, director of the Laboratory of Digital Anthropology, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, agrees: “Our sense of time, geography and entertainment in all artistic media is eroding and evolving. The home state of fashion is virtual and the challenge Fashion has never been creativity, but the demanding situations of intelligently combining the two mean that the moment of the fashion and beyond has expanded to a new position beyond the eye of the mind through Covid-19.
With September programming at the forefront, from interactivity and bringing incoming URLs closer to IRL breaches, facilitating conversations in the fan community and establishing live and traditional platforms, here are the key lessons learned from virtual LFW and knowledge on where you can go. Following:
Collision of mindsets the existing platform
The platform, created in just two months, was designed as a marketing/discovery platform for audiences (consumer-fans, press and buyers) with the ability to be redesigned (largely) in the future. The platform content still live includes streaming panels, movies, music playlists, photo slideshows and even virtual displays. Affirming the price of the combined bag, the CFB shows that the most viewed content to date, from 159,000 site visits (approximately 60,000 exclusive visitors) and counting, was (“to our surprise”) the elegance of the 2020 university exhibitions; Jalebi: a virtual reality exhibition through the Indo-Nigerian Londoner Priya Ahluwalia; a music video in the style of Scottish-Jamaican designer Nicholas Daley and a specialized consultation on heritage and innovation in retail.
As Kayvan Moghaddassi, founder of Network Digital technologists, explains, who created the platform: “The purpose of creating anything we can also build at any time, adding extraction platforms [social networks] that might not even exist yet, adding from anywhere.”
For now, it’s a bit messy: a lot of content, a problematic lack of navigation (more on this later), mature for UX innovation: “But fashion has been the industry focused on perfection,” Phair says, “while generation The sector, although it doesn’t oppose perfection, believes in an iterative approach. The fusion of these two cultures is incredibly exciting”.
Digital natives ask for accompaniments (including IRL experiments)
Phair insists that, despite returning to the already emerging IRL programming, the preference for the virtual is there because “fashion weeks are consumer-oriented.” Social media means that it’s no longer just for trade, and that the industry probably has more tactics to do business than those formats.” In addition, a new generation of designers and their enthusiasts see the role of the fashion designer through a set of lenses very different from that of his predecessors; One designer’s Holy Grail of public relations is the anathema of another, which catapults the classic style of free-falling fashion display:
“For a younger audience and designers who are virtual natives, it’s another global world of self-expression and communication, and very individualized,” says Moghaddassi. For designers, it’s incredibly important to be able to produce content that they can control. These mini-entrepreneurs must be provided in a particular manner corresponding to their brand. »»
For big brands where budget is an impediment and for whom physical spectacle will stimulate virtual reach, the key will be the generation that fills/or fuses those realities. Burberry, for example, has just announced a closed physical screen for September, with a virtual component that has still been released to the public.
As such, Moghaddassi shows that they are already running into the platform’s functions to reflect that the URL complies with IRL’s request: “We take a look at how other people may feel concerned if they are not in IRL space, for example, by obviously indicating who is in the front row if you look remotely; create a live buzzing feeling online. Part of that will be exploring cellular fun [which accounted for about 50% of the platform audience this time] if you use headphones, which is potentially much more immersive than looking at a computer.”
Community and collectivism
The network also represents a significant mileage, with a greater customer audience. According to Moghaddassi, “since many of these occasions involve conversations that take position as they develop, we are thinking about how to create centers to recognize connections.”
Such conversations underscore the strength of the collective showcase. Despite the heated debate around the decentralization of the fashion calendar and the dissolution of the core of Fashion Weeks (Gucci, Saint Laurent, Michael Kors), the tribal atmosphere of fashion, where the discovery similar to movements and equipment, as well as Americans is very appealing: “People pay attention at once and there is much to say about creating a moment in time that provides oxygen to all brands. Array, especially where larger brands add their star strength to kindly throw at emerging designers,” Phair says.
Remarkably, the biggest designers were largely AWOL this time, as were the superstar content creators (designers but also filmmakers, tech and musical talents) who wanted to provide surprise factor content similar to McQueen and Chalayan’s happy days and their border. clique pushers. It’s a scenario that Phair predicts will replace as the platform evolves and the role of the next generation of Fashion Week is widely appreciated: “I think if other people perceive fashion week to be open to everyone, designers will perceive that they want to create much more consumer-oriented content.”
Look at life
To offer those moments, it will also require more live: to watch dating and hum the countdowns of cultural tastes, watch the next-generation American TV app NTWRK for a perfect example. As the customer’s appetite accelerated exponentially through blocking, the industry-only virtual consulting team of many live streams (Burberry’s mid-china crash tests with Alibaba saw an audience of 1.4 million, founded on an expected 50k). An opportunity not to be missed.
Phair believes he’s on the cards (“until September, many designers will fill their chains with sources after Covid and show a genuine novelty”), he said through the existing sophisticated adoption of the Smartzer shopping content technology platform. So far, Smartzer has been implemented to make the reels of daily virtual highlights interactive: by clicking on a designer’s content, users are connected to their profile, a tool that has generated massive engagement rates (78%), with the creation of purchase links, or at least pre-order. Eminently possible matrix.
Cultural background of the new navigation.
What is certain is that in the age of awareness of the alliance of admission and logo, the cultural context will be the king in terms of artistic vision and also in the marketing chain. This is another sense amplified through blocking, as enthusiasts are angry with logos that drive pre-planned content, regardless of the change in cultural temperament.
“Fashion goes far beyond clothes,” Phair says. “This is a component of verbal cultural exchange and it is vital that consumers also adhere to the purpose of designers and what they represent. And you can only do it when you’ve combined other art forms. A virtual platform will make those other means of participating less difficult. »
Perhaps the most notable example came here from Charles Jeffrey and his LOVERBOY label, who noted that the cult author of Glaswegian reuses his platform’s privilege in the soft black Lives Matter protests through SOLASTA, a live-streaming show through his basement studio/club with black creatives, adding newly fashioned graduate Catherine Hudson, singer-songwriter Rachela Chinouriri and the poet and activist Kai-Is. The public was invited to donate to the UK Black Pride if they felt they had “learned or felt something.” “By structuring our technique for this Fashion Week, we identified the important desire to create fundraising mechanisms opposed to racism,” Jeffrey says. “None of these jobs would have felt any other way and the varied cast would ever feel ‘enough’, because diversity and the improvement of the new ability to skill are who we are.
According to Sophie Jewes, founder of public relations firm Raven, which represents LOVERBOY: “It will be vital to discover the balance between what the public, not brands, wants and wants alike. Personally, I don’t think live fashion exhibitions in the classic sense of work. Fashion can surely seem like entertainment; I think what we’ve achieved with The Charles Jeffrey’s LOVERBOY show is, in fact, a compelling and original example of this.” Jews also cite London’s roundtable Bianca Saunders in collaboration on the experimental film platform SHOWstudio and Swedish designer Per Gotson’s surreal thirty-second animation crusade as ‘brilliant flashes of programming’.
Moghaddassi suggests that the creation of content groups, themes on the site, will be the key to the next iteration of the platform, echoing the fundamental mechanisms of e-commerce: “There will be more personality and design in the future; more advisory tools, similar content and interconnection, which is only really imaginable when faced with repeated visits.”
Custom platform
Such a tradition will also redefine the B2B experience, with portals for buyers that differ much more from the customer’s journey. It is already in position by purchasing equipment such as Joor Passport, an application that allows the logo to which buyers see their collections and how (what products and also what prices), recalibrating the website to infinity. Affirming the benefits of a multimedia and traditional show designed for review, 443 exclusive buyers used the Joor app on LFW Digital, 50% after the event. The big logos? A bloodless wall, Alexa Chung, Ahluwalia, Axel Ariagato and Anya Hindmarch.
Aware of the roar of immersive engagement tools, it is already being associated with 360-degree video technology, which will come with built-in discussion tracks as well as a transfer to the virtual showroom.
Evolving a Fashion Week like no other
It’s an experiential maelstrom that can cause a primary renaissance of the industry. As Jewes says: “We will think of 2020 as the year when ‘experience’ evolved faster than ever. In practice, there will be no other fashion week like June; therefore, the conclusions will have to focus on what captured the cultural consciousness, what made the public feel something?
I am a journalist and logo strater who specializes in defining and predicting the intersections between technology, pop culture and customer behavior.
I am a journalist and logo strater who specializes in defining and predicting the intersections between technology, pop culture and customer behavior. Dissect all facets of retail engagement, virtual commerce and logo communications for space design Lately I am guilty of retail – Trends, Ideas and Innovations – at global future agency, Stylus. I have spoken at many events, adding Retail Design Expo, International Retail Design Conference, Milan Design Week and Decoded Fashion; I am a normal SHOWstudio worker; founding member of the expert group of the Digital Anthropology Laboratory at the London College of Fashion and an expert collaborator in Mastered’s “professional accelerator”. I have written articles for The Times, Dazed – Confused, Vogue, Hole – Corner, Luxure and have written two books on visual culture: Stylists: New Fashion Visionaries (2012) and Fashion Music: Fashions Creative Shaping Pop Culture (2016).