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flaunt the imperfection
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Now, Online-Only Fashion Shows for Busy Editors
By ERIC WILSON
KCD, the public relations company that produces fashion shows for top labels like Marc Jacobs and Givenchy, announced on Monday that it is offering a new service wherein it will produce some shows in an entirely digital format so that overtaxed editors can watch them online. During Fashion Week, particularly in New York, it has become a common complaint that there are too many shows, something like 300 scheduled within eight days, and that a lot of designers get lost as a result. The new idea, which is being pitched as an alternative to runway or presentation formats, is that rather than slogging across town or making some excuse about being on deadline, an editor or buyer can watch the collection on a computer or mobile device.
While live-streaming shows has become one popular way to expose fashion to a wider audience, watching shows on a computer doesn’t quite replicate the experience of being there and seeing the clothes in person. KCD’s Digital Fashion Shows, accessibly only by password, intend to go further, with runway footage, designer interviews about the collections and notes on the clothes. It will be interesting to see just how different that seems from what many large fashion houses, like Chanel and Burberry, already do by putting enormous amounts of behind-the-scenes information about their collections on their own Web sites and mobile apps, available to anyone.
Prabal Gurung, for his first collection for ICB for fall, will be the first designer to show online only, on Feb. 15. (He will still show his signature label conventionally on a runway.) Ed Filipowski, a co-president of KCD, said the idea, which he hopes to expand to other designers and cities, is to replicate the show experience as closely as possible, which is why only editors and buyers will be able to access the site (digitalfashionshows.com).
“The password is just a replacement for your seat number,” he said. “To me, it’s not MTV, it’s not YouTube. It’s for the industry.”
You can imagine the possibilities in such technology for smaller designers who don’t have the financial resources to do develop online shows of their own, or for companies with secondary lines that currently take up a lot of space on the calendar. Certainly, designers as a whole need to rethink their approach to runway shows if they’re going to make Fashion Week a viable entity for the 21st century. But you also have to wonder about the longer-term issues such an approach might raise for critics and journalists who cover these collections, since the information and images will be entirely filtered through a publicity machine rather than their own eyes and ears. Will a collection look better if it is presented to us in one easy-to-swallow package? Probably, but an equally valid question, given the schedule of shows, is this: Would we ever have time to see it otherwise?
nytimes.com
By ERIC WILSON
KCD, the public relations company that produces fashion shows for top labels like Marc Jacobs and Givenchy, announced on Monday that it is offering a new service wherein it will produce some shows in an entirely digital format so that overtaxed editors can watch them online. During Fashion Week, particularly in New York, it has become a common complaint that there are too many shows, something like 300 scheduled within eight days, and that a lot of designers get lost as a result. The new idea, which is being pitched as an alternative to runway or presentation formats, is that rather than slogging across town or making some excuse about being on deadline, an editor or buyer can watch the collection on a computer or mobile device.
While live-streaming shows has become one popular way to expose fashion to a wider audience, watching shows on a computer doesn’t quite replicate the experience of being there and seeing the clothes in person. KCD’s Digital Fashion Shows, accessibly only by password, intend to go further, with runway footage, designer interviews about the collections and notes on the clothes. It will be interesting to see just how different that seems from what many large fashion houses, like Chanel and Burberry, already do by putting enormous amounts of behind-the-scenes information about their collections on their own Web sites and mobile apps, available to anyone.
Prabal Gurung, for his first collection for ICB for fall, will be the first designer to show online only, on Feb. 15. (He will still show his signature label conventionally on a runway.) Ed Filipowski, a co-president of KCD, said the idea, which he hopes to expand to other designers and cities, is to replicate the show experience as closely as possible, which is why only editors and buyers will be able to access the site (digitalfashionshows.com).
“The password is just a replacement for your seat number,” he said. “To me, it’s not MTV, it’s not YouTube. It’s for the industry.”
You can imagine the possibilities in such technology for smaller designers who don’t have the financial resources to do develop online shows of their own, or for companies with secondary lines that currently take up a lot of space on the calendar. Certainly, designers as a whole need to rethink their approach to runway shows if they’re going to make Fashion Week a viable entity for the 21st century. But you also have to wonder about the longer-term issues such an approach might raise for critics and journalists who cover these collections, since the information and images will be entirely filtered through a publicity machine rather than their own eyes and ears. Will a collection look better if it is presented to us in one easy-to-swallow package? Probably, but an equally valid question, given the schedule of shows, is this: Would we ever have time to see it otherwise?
nytimes.com
