Are digital shows the way ahead?
No one’s saying – yet – that the digital show is better than the old, physical kind. “I miss seeing your faces,” said Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s creative director, to journalists who had gathered online a few hours before her digital show on Wednesday night, rather as they used to congregate in small groups for the ritual backstage preview.
But the medium is challenging designers to think in new, creative ways. Now that they’ve twigged it can be a way to demonstrate how in tune they are with a younger demographic, they’re piling in.
In the past week, Dior, Gucci, Prada and Valentino have all had a go, showing different seasons – resort, pret-a-porter and couture – at wildly different price levels. After years of trying to educate the public, no one seems overly fussed about the distinctions any more.
Everyone’s invited to the party.
That’s pretty radical given how rigorously they all policed their borders until five months ago, limiting entrance to their shows with an efficiency from which the Red Army could have learnt a lesson, and often giving e-commerce a wide berth.
Gucci’s Alessandro Michele went a step further and invited his design team to model. I love his sweeping embrace of kooky beauty. Even if it sometimes seems a bit forced, surely those pervasive billboards have done a lot to help unconventional looking people feel better.
The Post-it notes with their instructions to leave off the mascara, or leave hair natural, that were left on the pictures now adorning Gucci’s own website, are another nice touch that will make its audience feel more like insiders.
Not all houses are finding it easy to adapt. Some are pointing a camera at a traditional catwalk and hoping for the best. The best has not happened. Others are seizing the opportunity to become auteurs, pulling together film directors, choreographers and musicians.
Barely three weeks after a film she oversaw for Dior’s couture collection, which featured mermaids, Chiuri returned with a live stream resort show (now on dior.com so viewers can watch at their leisure) from Lecce in Puglia.
This was the show she’d always envisioned pre-lockdown, but choreographed for an audience tuning in on their phones. She’d gone to a huge amount of effort – live performances, a million illuminations around the impressive town square – because, having spent her childhood holidays in Puglia, she knows how devastated these Italian towns have been by lockdown.
You could see the gratitude on the faces of the musicians and dancers. The collection also made ample use of local crafts, including macramé and weaving specific to the region. These were mainly light, airy clothes in linen and cotton, anchored with wide belts (a belt could be the accessory of the year, if we continue wearing wafty dresses). They were pale, too – lots of creams, beiges and white (the colour of suffragettes), which was true of Prada, where the press were sent 3D cardboard glasses to watch the show, and also of Valentino.
The latter was interesting because it was a hybrid: part physical, part screened. Around 30 Italian journalists watched it live in Rome while the rest of us marvelled at the way creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli converted the lightness and volume of his spectacular clothes into sculptural forms. This was the presentation that suggests digital could actually be part of fashion’s future.