Walk, walk fashion baby, work it — but on a virtual runway?
COVID-19 has forced many changes around the world. Beyond serious financial challenges, fashion has had to grapple with bringing a visual, tactile medium to customers who aren’t able to leave their homes. One of the hallmarks of the industry, runway shows, will be impossible for the foreseeable future. As the industry has to re-evaluate its fundamental ways of working, virtual reality and other digital solutions may be the answer to how to bring fashion shows to the industry from their homes.
Men’s Fashion week, Haute Couture week, and Bridal week have already been canceled. But even prior to this impossibly difficult pandemic, designers have been exploring alternatives to traditional runway shows. Runway shows are oftentimes expensive to produce and result in a huge amount of waste as elaborate sets and runways are constructed for one day events and then all is thrown away. There is the additional environmental impact of editors and other industry leaders who each year fly from New York, to London, to Milan, to Paris — and that’s just for the men’s and women’s shows during September and February. Finally, these shows are exclusive and difficult to gain access to. The designers only offer invitations to a tight circle of fashion’s elite and top customers.
So, what are our alternatives to physical runway shows? Helmut Lang may have been the first bringing the runway to us in digital form when the designer showed his Fall 1998 collection on a CD-ROM. Alexander McQueen was another designer ahead of his time, streaming his iconic Plato’s Atlantis show live online. The show featured the launch of a new Lady Gaga song and the subsequent traffic from his fans crashed the stream. Tommy Hilfiger even opened a digital showroom in 2015. There are more modern examples as well: Tanya Taylor eschewed a traditional runway show this February and instead released a series of delightful YouTube videos featuring comedians and actresses wearing her new Spring collection. And this past week, Pronovias launched what they’re calling the first digital showroom in the bridal industry.
The CFDA urged designers for the canceled Bridal Week this March to, “reformat live shows and presentations scheduled…to show their newest collections digitally, or in a similar format.” It seems like the future of the runway will be digital in the short run, and potentially even after this crisis ends. The most common approach to this is through providing videos or livestreams of traditionally formatted runway shows. A recent example of this is when Shanghai Fashion Week partnered with Tmall in February to bring fashion presentations online. There are also burgeoning virtual reality technologies that could allow for a more immersive digital runway experience.
Iris Van Herpen is a designer who has always been known for embracing new technologies, often leveraging 3-D printing in her design process. She is now creating an immersive virtual reality experience for her new collection. As she describes it, “I really hope we can bring some of that into a VR experience, where people really can be in the atelier with us for a moment and see the evolution of a garment that is growing in front of their eyes. I think we’ve just started to see the possibilities.”
Although there are many advantages to shifting runway shows to a digital format, I also think some of the magic will be lost. We can all watch recordings of concerts on YouTube, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from buying concert tickets. There’s something about the experience of witnessing something in person with a group of others that I don’t think can be fully translated to a digital experience — at least not the technology we have available today. In order for brands to successfully share their new collections in digital formats, they will need to focus on preserving some of the best parts of in person runway shows: community, a sense of dynamism and motion, and storytelling.
The trend of digital runways does dovetail well with another burgeoning fashion trend: clothing and models that only exist in a digital format, and don’t even exist in the physical world. Could we reach a day in which we watch digital clothes on digital models walk down digital runways through our virtual reality headsets? That future might not be as far off as we think.
