Fashion designers should love fashion week. It is the culmination of months of work. Celebrities clamour to attend their shows, then study each model as if the world’s future rested on the cut of a skirt. But designers are pouting about the six-monthly ritual – so much so that the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) commissioned America’s perhaps least glamorous group, management consultants, to explore their complaints. The Boston Consulting Group interviewed more than 50 people, including designers, editors, bloggers and retailers. So why, did its report conclude, is fashion week no longer fashionable?
Fashion week used to serve a distinct purpose. Designers would prepare collections and present clothes to the press, to major retailers and to other industry insiders. Fashion editors would then prepare sumptuous magazine spreads featuring the clothes they liked best. Retailers would order this or that dress. About four to six months later, those clothes would appear in shops.
Technology has upended all this. As soon as models sashay down the runway,
photographs are posted online and shared endlessly across social media. Fast-fashion brands copy (though the industry prefers the euphemism “interpret”) designers’ styles, often stocking look-alikes in their shops before designers’ own clothes make it to department stores. When designers’ clothes finally arrive, they seem stale. It is no coincidence that the industry’s top two retailers are TJX (the company behind TJ Maxx/TK Maxx) and Inditex. TJX buys brand-name clothes from stores that can't sell them at full price, and offers them at a deep discount. Inditex owns Zara, the pioneer in fast fashion.
Few designers like the current system. Less obvious is what they should replace it with. One idea is for fashion houses to show clothes only to certain people, such as retailers and some press, behind closed doors. Designers would then stage a bigger, public presentation a few months later, when those clothes are available in stores. There would, of course, be the threat that some images would leak. Another idea would be to continue the current system, but make a small subset of clothes available immediately. Designers are already testing new ideas. Burberry and Tom Ford, for example, have said that their September 2016 fashion shows would showcase clothes available immediately. For the foreseeable future, experimentation will be in vogue.
How technology made fashion week passé
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/03/economist-explains-5