Digital Has Irrevocably Transformed Fashion Weeks, Is It Finally Time To Change The Model?

Over the past few weeks and months, fashion brands Matthew Williamson, Hunter, Rebecca Minkoff and Thakoon (to name a few) have made strategic decisions that will not only redefine their business models, but impact the fashion industry as a whole.

Each of them has opted to either withdraw from participating in fashion week, or make their fashion week endeavor a more consumer-facing experience.

At the heart of such plans lies the challenge that social media has presented. Where once these flashy events in New York, London, Milan and Paris were intended for a trade audience and thus shown six months ahead of when they hit stores, channels from Twitter TWTR -4.35% to Instagram and Snapchat, as well as livestreaming, have opened them up to the wider public.

Givenchy invited members of the public to its spring/summer 2016 show at New York Fashion Week (Photo credit: Joshua LOTT/AFP/Getty Images)

The issue in doing so has been the barrier to feed desire. While numerous brands have promoted exclusive “buy now” items from the runway (see Burberry, Moschino et al), the timelag for consumers to get their hands on the product otherwise, has only proven detrimental. Come next season when the respective items are suitable to wear, shoppers are already onto the next idea, they’ve potentially bought a cheap alternative copied by a fast fashion retailer at the time, and they’re thus less interested in purchasing what they would have been when they were truly captured in the moment. It’s an ROI conundrum.

As Linda Fargo, senior vice president of fashion and store presentation director at Bergdorf Goodman, told WWD: “We give [the customer] shearling coats in June when she’s just starting to think about shorts. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create excitement and buzz for beautiful products and brand image with runway shows, allowing fast retail to copy it within weeks, while it takes us five months to get deliveries to her. By then, she’s tired of it because it’s been seen in too many posts and images. If you described the fashion cycle from a marketing, seasonality, desire/fulfillment perspective to anyone with any common sense, they would look at you like you were crazy.”

Needless to say, the industry is slowly but surely feeling the need to do something about it. Hunter is stepping away from London Fashion Week altogether in a bid to focus on its association with music festival culture instead.

Matthew Williamson similarly decided to no longer show in London (its last one was for fall 2015, held in February) and rather focus on a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business based on instantly-shoppable collection releases. It closed its store and removed the majority of its wholesale partnerships, bar Net-a-Porter, as a result.

Hunter’s final London Fashion Week show, spring/summer 2016

Thakoon has just announced it will likewise focus on a “real-time fashion” model, and adopt a “see-now, buy-now, wear-now approach” based on e-commerce. It will no longer show during New York. And Rebecca Minkoff has opted to keep its presence during fashion week, but instead make its event a consumer-facing one by showing current season. That means it will present spring 2016, in spring 2016 (even though it already showed it in September – doubling up for this first occasion), and be able to actively entice those consumers to buy as the items hit the shop floor within the following 30 to 60 days.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has accordingly hired the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to conduct a study on whether or not New York Fashion Week at large should become a consumer-facing event presenting collections more closely aligned with retail drops. It will survey industry insiders early next year to try and figure out an ideal model.

While Tom Ford and Thomas Tait have both opted to replace full shows with intimate appointments for press and buyers to see the next collections under embargo in February – meaning there’s still enough lead-time to manufacture the lines – the broader suggestion will be much like Minkoff’s plans to also then host a full runway show of current season. It’s simply about shifting the calendar accordingly.

The idea is to capitalise on the buzz a new collection enables, much like a film does with its openings around the world. Givenchy made headlines in September when it offered tickets to the public to its show in New York, enabling 1,200 non-industry folk to attend. It still presented a future season (spring 2016), but the move was a notable one for the way it treated fashion week like a movie premiere, music gig or sports event – as entertainment first and foremost.

Yet it’s the shoppable bit that’s important, which some of this new round of designers making changes, are addressing. The strategy is about grabbing hold of the idea of instant gratification and stepping away from an archaic system that no longer makes sense in today’s digital age, in order to drive sales.

A look from Matthew Williamson’s party capsule collection, released November 2015

For Williamson the model means six collections presented a year to suit what the label calls the “buy-now-wear-now mentality” of its consumer. A showroom has also been opened in London in place of the store, operating as an appointment-only boutique for online shoppers.

Rosanna Falconer, business director at Matthew Williamson, says she was frustrated by the fact she used to be presenting images on social media fit for spring and frequently receiving comments back from fans referring to the fact it was cold outside, for instance. “It was so simple for the shopper; it just didn’t make sense. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re pushing something onto a consumer that they’re not ready for.”

The brand launched its first in-season collection with a party capsule this November to great success. “It’s had really big uptake and genuinely feels like we’re catering for the needs of the customer in the right moment,” Falconer explains.

In addition, she feels as though the brand has greater control over its digital marketing than ever before. Not only can it present an undiluted vision of the brand in the right moment, but also instantly track sales from specific social announcements onto its e-commerce site more effectively.

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Caroline Homlish, a New York-based digital brand strategist who recently launched her own agency following senior digital positions at Chanel and Alexander McQueen, agrees communications around collections becomes all the more simplified, not to mention amplified, with a single release date. “Right now as a marketer, we have to come up with a whole set of content around the show, then make decisions about what to hold back and release later. We almost have to do two waves of communications, but the second wave is so much later the challenge has been around how to make it exciting. And you can’t really.”

If the events do become more open to consumers, however, she warns brands of the need to facilitate what that conversation looks like in the moment that matters. “If you’re going to do something for the public, you need to help them craft the message, and you need to give them tools to tell the story you want told,” she says. “That’s a scary prospect for a lot of brands.”

Kendall Jenner models in the 2015 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show (Photo credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)

It’s one already handled well by Victoria’s Secret however, with its annual extravaganza that generates millions of TV views, not to mention social media publicity like no other.

Yet that example works because of the fact it is such an elaborate (and expensive) affair, which makes Homlish question whether a consumer-facing fashion week becomes a series of competitions for the most theatrical and excessive performances. While the two brands she worked for are renowned for putting on such fetes, the majority of fashion week shows, as seen on livestreams over the past few years, are straight down the runway shots of collections walking out. In some ways, they’re accordingly fairly boring.

If everyone is competing against each other, and all of them are extravagant circuses, or indeed celebrity spins, does it become saturated and overwhelming, she asks? “The question then becomes, how do I get [consumers] there if there’s once again so much noise, and then how do I get them from there in-store or online to buy. What’s the consumer path for it all?”

Add in such considerations as what happens to bloggers versus editors, who gets invited in person along with consumers, and who has access to what and when, and there’s a lot to be resolved it seems. But it isn’t something we’ll see adopted across the board just yet anyway. As Falconer suggests, it’s not a move that’s going to be right for everyone. “It’s certainly a seismic shift in the industry, and it’s on the minds of a lot of designers to think about and question, but it’s a mistake to apply the same rules to all brands. We’re not a trend-led brand, but rather one that produces beautiful clothes that are timeless and can be worn season after season. That’s why this model can work for us. We looked at our strengths and reviewed where we were. To make that decision you need to understand who you are inside out, look at your figures, and from that draw your own conclusions.”

Adam Wray, fashion curator at FashionREDEF, a daily newsletter aggregating and analysing news from across the industry, agrees: “I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer as to what direction fashion weeks should be moving in. What’s right for one city might not fit another. New York, for instance, seems to be leaning into the perception that it’s a more commercially focused fashion week, and that, to me, makes a lot of sense. You don’t see many pushy, directional runway shows in New York, so why not rework the calendar to erase the gap between showing and selling? Does that mean Paris should necessarily follow suit, though? I’m not sure.”

Chanel’s elaborate airport themed spring/summer 2016 set (Photo credit: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images)

Indeed Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, told WWD: “As far as we are concerned, the system is not broken [as the CFDA referred to it]. The fashion industry is a huge success, our companies are growing very healthily and business is excellent… We are not going to be ruled by technology.”

It’s a statement that feels relatively out of touch with evolving luxury consumer behaviour. Growth these days is, after all, largely coming from digital for such businesses. According to McKinsey, e-commerce will be worth $70bn or 18% of total luxury sales by 2020 (up from just 5% in 2014), and the world’s third largest luxury market after China and the US.

So the question is whether such disconnected attitudes are about brands not being up to speed with their adoption of digital and thus less willing to consider changing the fashion week model. Or is it more to do with the solution being different for those considered heritage houses in comparison to their commercial New York counterparts? (For reference, Carlo Capasa, president of the Italian Chamber of Fashion, was much of the same opinion).

Homlish doesn’t imagine such cities changing anytime soon, but she also agrees that a line can be drawn between what’s considered “luxury” and “contemporary” these days. It could be that we end up dividing the industry, positioning couture and ready-to-wear as they’ve always been, and introducing a third consumer event series alongside suited to those actively able and agile enough to go direct to the consumer.

“The answer is, there is no answer yet. It needs a lot of experimentation,” Homlish comments. It’s complicated, but the good news is, it’s finally being discussed, she adds.

At the end of the day, technology advancements and digital evolution aside, the same objective stands for all businesses concerned: to sell more stuff. On that very simple basis, it’s about time such opportunities were at least examined.

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