Fashion For Everyone

The show must go on. The fashion show that is. So say Chanel, Burberry and Christian Dior. Despite an entirely digital Shanghai fashion week in March (which was hailed a great success, drawing 11 million viewers) and a virtual men’s fashion week coming out of London this month, some of the industry’s most iconic brands are not ready to give up on the grandiose catwalk productions that have often inspired more conversation and column inches over the past several years than the collections themselves.

My experience of fashion weeks has been limited, but eye-opening nonetheless. The fashion hierarchy is as in your face as the expensive handbags hanging off every arm. Let’s just say that if the Simone Rocha show at Southwark’s Gothic Cathedral in 2017 had been a luxury liner like the Titanic, I would have been in steerage. After the show, the sunny south-London pavements heaved with fashion heavy-hitters – the first-class attendees and front row favourites – such as Lucy Yeomans (then editor-in-chief of Net-a-Porter), Sunday Times Style editor Lorraine Candy, and her daughter (I wonder did the tweenie get a front-row seat too?) and model, designer and all-round It-girl Alexa Chung. I was almost stepped on by a photographer desperate to get a picture of Chung. To quote Sex and the City, for a moment I was “fashion roadkill”.

The streets outside quickly became a circus of influencers performing for the cameras. The safest thing to do was step out of their way, so I stood by a wall and watched, enthralled by the mania. It was a fashion feeding frenzy, though I’m not sure who was preying on who. The ritual of dressing for fashion weeks has become a business strategy that has given many women with no foothold in the industry a status akin to that of Anna Wintour’s. As much as street style has become the bread and butter of many photographers, it’s also the means by which influencers ultimately pay their bills. Published photographs mean a profile, which means social media followers, which mean brand partnerships, which in turn means money and status. So as much as photographers are stepping on third-class passengers like me to get to the money shot, the show-goers themselves are just as fast-footed at getting in front of the cameras.

Despite big brands’ reluctance to forgo their traditional catwalk shows, the digitisation of fashion weeks holds huge appeal to many, not least of all consumers, who’ve been closed off from the real-life ceremony of fashion shows for too long.

Digital fashion week simply feels more democratic at a time when the fashion industry is being scrutinised for its record on inclusivity; this doesn’t just apply to the number of people of colour working in senior positions within the industry or the number of ethnic, plus size and older models walking the runways, it extends to public access too. Shouldn’t fashion feel like it’s for everyone rather than just a cooler-than-thou subset of the population?

Instagram has been instrumental in creating a more egalitarian industry, certainly, but traditional shows with their Mean Girls approach to who sits where feels outdated. It made sense when editors and buyers were given priority seating at shows because they were solely responsible for delivering that sartorial message to the public via the stores they represented or the magazines they edited. But today, social media does that job for them, and the “right” celebrity will receive a front-row seat before a fashion journalist, anyway, because in our celebrity-obsessed culture, they have more media value to brands. At the SS18 shows, for instance, two tweets by Kim Kardashian generated 57,000 comments and 3.4 million Likes collectively. That kind of engagement with customers is priceless to any label, global or local. And these days women are far more interested in what celebrities and influencers such as Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine are wearing than they are the editor of Elle (who’s name I don’t know, which says something in itself).

There’s been a gradual shift in focus over the past several years away from what’s on the runway to who’s sitting in the front row, which is a shame because for me the spectacle of fashion is not nearly as interesting as the garments themselves. I’ve always considered myself a lover of clothes rather than a lover of fashion. For me, it’s all about the end product and how it makes me feel rather than the buzz surrounding a brand or the personalities behind it. I’m sure if you were a regular attendee of Chanel’s fashion week shows, you’d disagree vehemently with my opinion that the production always overtook the collection. All anybody spoke of in 2019 was the Alpine winter wonderland; in 2017, the buzz was all about the space station complete with life-sized rocket reconstruction; and in 2016, the carnival-themed streets of Havana appeared to be the highlight. The clothes seemed secondary to the sets.

Digital presentations would certainly shift the focus back to where it belongs. They would also go a long way to improving the industry’s record on sustainability. The number of air miles travelled by fashion week goers over the course of a month is phenomenal and regularly comes under attack from environmentalists. Now that the pandemic has forced everyone to rethink how much they travel and why, will there even be an appetite to fly to four different cities in one month when you could enjoy a virtual front-row seat from the comfort of your own living room or a virtual face-to-face with designers rather than having to jostle your way backstage along with every other interested party and strain to hear anything quote-worthy because of the behind-the-scenes scrum?

Christian Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri has justified the brand’s planned catwalk show in September by explaining that they didn’t want to let down the painters, electricians, carpenters and myriad other employees booked in to oversee the production. It’s a fair point. Others fear the immense creativity involved in show production will be lost forever. Besides Chanel, designers such as Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen have staged incredibly elaborate and innovative productions through the years, which have become almost folkloric. But the idea of fashion as theatre doesn’t have to end, it simply has to be reimagined through digital platforms. And how will a live show feel without a live audience anyway? Does one work without the other? It’s proving a problem for the premier football league in any case.

Last month, French powerhouse Saint Laurent announced that it would no longer conform to the traditional fashion schedule, specifically shows in February and September. The brand is moving towards “formats that are more intimate and closely aligned to the final customer”. Where heritage brands like Saint Laurent go, others follow, so it will be interesting to see how this unexpected move influences the industry as a whole. Will Saint Laurent kill the catwalk show for everyone?

The Guardian fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley wrote in a recent article that, “Digital is how we live now – so that’s where the fashion show needs to live, too.” Of course, she’s right. Fashion has always been a reflection of the cultural zeitgeist and we live in a digital world whether we like it or not. But for all those who mourn the demise of traditional runway shows, there are just as many who will be buoyed by it; young designers and emerging brands, for instance, who find the costs of catwalk shows prohibitive and the choice of venues restrictive. Those who haven’t been institutionalised by tradition can appreciate how much wider an audience they can reach through a digital show, how it can showcase a more modern form of creative expression, and how it can serve their digitally focused approach to business and marketing.

But like Saint Laurent said, it all comes back to the consumer. And perhaps going forward, women everywhere will be able to virtually sit alongside each important editor, influencer and celebrity and watch a Simone Rocha runway show in comfort, without having to suffer the mortification of becoming fashion roadkill to do it.

Marie Kelly, July 2020.