- The first “high fashion runway show entirely from home” just took place, complete with famous models and designers. The occasion was Fashion Unites, a YouTube-streamed edition of CR Runway, the special fashion show run by Carine Roitfeld, the former French Vogue editor and Tom Ford muse, and her son, Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, the president and chief executive of CR Fashion Book Ltd., to raise money for the amfAR Fund to Fight Covid-19. Billed as “the first of its kind” by its host, Derek Blasberg, the head of fashion and beauty for YouTube, it was hailed as “a high-fashion runway show entirely from home.”
- On the other hand, it doesn’t exactly make you focus on the clothes. They become almost beside the point. it was less about the pleasure and potential of clothes than about the pleasure of voyeuristic glimpses of famous people in their homes.So while this may be, as Mr. Rousteing (Olivier Rousteing of Balmain) said while perched on his staircase, framed by its elaborate iron scrollwork, “a new way of presenting the fashion show,” it may not ultimately be the best way.
- Shanghai Fashion Week wrapped up in the 2nd week of April. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, organizers brought the entire autumn-winter 2020 edition online, making it the world’s first fashion-week event at this scale to go fully digital. More than 150 designers and brands livestreamed their collections from March 24-30 via Tmall, Alibaba Group’s e-commerce platform. To enrich the viewing experience, some designers went on camera to share their inspirations with fans in real time, while others made use of the event’s “See Now, Buy Now” format, which allows the audience to purchase catwalk items with their phones. Consumers were able to buy products from the current season or pre-order new looks from brands’ fall collections.
- Recently the British Fashion Council announced a new version of London Fashion Week that will occur during the previously scheduled dates for London Fashion Week: Men’s of June 12 to June 14, 2020. Instead of physical shows, London Fashion Week will be entirely digital, with content rolling out on londonfashionweek.co.uk.
The types of content that might appear on LFW’s site could range from a digital lookbook to a brand video to a written-out designer Q&A or even a podcast. The diversity of the offering will be related to what designers are able to produce during self-isolation, and will also reflect a new strain of branding, marketing, and communication that has taken hold during the pandemic. Instagram Lives, social media posts, Zoom conferences, and direct-to-consumer e-tail have only become more integral to fashion brands during this lockdown period, showing that direct engagement with customers and fans is more essential than ever—especially if the stories shared come with a letting down of one’s guard.
- The Met Gala, the most watched fashion-celebrity-society event of the year, and the party that heralds the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual blockbuster fashion show. But this year, because of the novel coronavirus, the exhibition, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” has been postponed and the party delayed indefinitely. On May 4, the first hft Met gala will take place (hft = high fashion twitter). Hosted by a group of Gen-Z students/hft users, it was originally conceived last November as a fun companion piece to an event they all followed obsessively, but assumed they would and could never access.
Since then, however, as the pandemic has swept across the world, putting an end to public gatherings and trapping everyone in sweatpants-styled isolation, what started out at a lark has become the only party in town. One that has a rather different agenda.
Instead of the highly stage-managed, highly branded, extremely lucrative marketing event the Met Gala has become, controlled by its chairwoman Anna Wintour, who determines the guest list and who wears what, when they arrive and what they eat, it will be an open-access celebration of dress as an outlet for self-expression.
5iveblog 