Fashion world mulls future
LONDON, Sept 19, (AP): It’s the September fashion week season, and in any other year London would be abuzz with fashionistas zipping across town in Mercedes Benzes, hobnobbing with celebrities at glittering catwalk shows before sipping champagne at latenight parties.
This is no typical year, though, and London Fashion Week is decidedly less glamorous. There are all of three socially-distanced catwalk shows, with a smattering of small salon shows or invitation-only appointments offered by designers like Victoria Beckham and Christopher Kane. International buyers, editors, and models aren’t jetting in. With most designers showing their wares online only, style in the COVID era is largely limited to streaming fashion shows on an iPad from the couch – probably with slippers in place of stilettos.
The luxury brand Burberry, which usually hosts a packed runway show complete with a red-carpet reception for A-list celebrities, decamped its models to a forest clearing Thursday for a live-streamed show with no catwalk or physical audience. Burberry shared its blend of performance art and fashion with some 42,000 viewers via Twitch, the streaming service for online gamers. “This is not a fullblown fashion week – it’s not mass audiences. It’s very much happening in private and the scales have tipped in favor of digital,” said Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, which organizes London Fashion Week.
Still, she said, it’s a step forward – albeit a small and tentative one – for the industry to regain some semblance of “the life we were living before”.
The fashion industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and in Europe, where countries are seeing an alarming new surge in cases, few consumers are in the mood to buy luxury bags and dresses. Nor are they likely to resume spending to pre-pandemic levels any time soon, with weddings and parties largely cancelled and big parts of the workforce staying at home. Forecasts by analysts predict global luxury goods sales could drop by 20% to 35% this year.
Many say that has forced a sharp rethink about how the business works. That includes questioning how the traditional calendar of biannual fashion weeks – always staged across New York, London, Milan and Paris – is organized, and how to leverage new technologies instead. While the glitzy trade events are key for designers to connect with global retailers and consumers, some critics say the relentless pace of fashion weeks generate an unnecessarily huge carbon footprint – and contribute to an unsustainable cycle of over-production.
“It’s a moment of reflection in terms of shows, but also in terms of business models and environmental impact. It’s a moment to reset,” Rush said.
Even before the virus outbreak, brands had been experimenting with technology to get to broader audiences by streaming shows online. In the same way that companies in other sectors are wondering whether employees will return to offices after the pandemic, the fashion industry is questioning whether there is even a place for models strutting up and down runways.