Fashion week is dead, long live fashion month
Fashion month was in flux long before Covid. The biannual circuit of New York, London, Milan and Paris has evolved from an industry-only, behind-closed-doors affair to what can sometimes seem like a series of social media moments choreographed for designers, models, celebrities, influencers and associated fashion-adjacent brands and hangers-on.
In recent years the focus has shifted from the clothes appearing on the catwalk to a multitude of other elements: set design, soundtrack, casting choices, a celebrity-packed front row all help create buzz that, on occasion, can drown out the impact of the collection itself. (Although anyone who thinks that visual feasts are purely an advent of the Instagram age would do well to revisit the couture shows of John Galliano for Christian Dior.)
While our seemingly insatiable appetite for street-style images has changed the visual reporting of fashion weeks by documenting the goings-on outside the shows as closely as those on the catwalks.
And the plague of catwalk copies ripped off and produced before the real thing can be released led to many designers experimenting with 'see now, buy now' collections, attempting to retrofit them into established calendars and schedules.
Not to mention the costs associated with creating a fashion show that is over in minutes: invoices in the thousands can be racked up on models, hair, make-up, lighting, soundtrack, venue, security, catering, seating, before taking into account the clothes themselves. Such expenditures put huge financial pressures on young brands, many of which have begun to eschew the system and operate direct to consumer.
Now, as Covid has largely caused the fashion world to press pause on in-person events and the sort of cheek-by-jowl seating that would cause an epidemiologist sleepless nights, it was inevitable that brands would rise to the challenge of designing a new fashion week for the digital frontier, encompassing fashion films, interviews and live events in order to communicate ideas for the new season in innovative ways.
But just what's in store? Read on for the highlights to look out for over the next few weeks.
