VOGUE BUSINESS | MAGHAN MCDOWELL
Last week, Helsinki Fashion Week events matched designers with tech firms demonstrating some surprising, new innovations.
—
Patrick McDowell was inspired by the concept of a queer-friendly Catholic church for his recent Helsinki Fashion Week collection. The London designer used an unlimited number of crystals and sourced fabric in the exact Pantone colour he wanted — Taroni silk pink. His venue was also a first: a Vatican City in the clouds. Two days later, London designer Damara Inglês presented an immersive installation that all but defied gravity. Attendees at the event, called The Fabric of Reality, could fly around her “runway” inspired by ocean creatures floating in space.
Both of these shows were entirely digital. While the technology is still nascent, the formats were a chance for designers and technologists to demonstrate the potential appeal of digital and virtual formats.
“So many of the experiences at digital fashion weeks have felt very flat, both in the content itself and the way in which it was viewed,” says Matthew Drinkwater, head of London’s Fashion Innovation Agency, which helped produce The Fabric of Reality. “Creating in virtual reality allowed us to pull the audience through the screen, into an entirely new era of experience and utterly dispel the myth that digital shows can never match the excitement and emotion of a physical one.”
The digital-only collections created for HFW’s Digital Village allowed viewers to pre-order physical garments, or, after the week’s events, claim a limited edition digital garment, which could be “dressed” on the customer’s picture or used in virtual spaces. On Sunday, the platform saw more than 3,000 transactions. Inglês’s presentation was part of a virtual reality fashion event produced by creative agency Ryot (which is owned by Verizon) and the Fashion Innovation Agency, designed for virtual reality headsets, although it can be watched on a computer. It’s too early to tell if the technology will resonate or be broadly adopted, but the opening day was so popular, it crashed the servers hosting it, according to the venue, Museum of Other Realities.
After experimenting with digital formats this summer, Paris, London and Milan Fashion Weeks have decided to return to physical shows in September. (New York Fashion Week will host most shows online.) While the pandemic spurred quick experimentation, the urgent timeframe made it difficult for the industry to meet high expectations for digital shows and critics have questioned whether they can be as effective as traditional in-person events. Two divergent camps have emerged: those wanting to embrace new formats and the creative license that technology offers, and those more firmly committed to tradition.
“The fashion industry, for as creative as it is, is a creature of habit. These brands were caught very off guard even though everyone was saying the fashion shows were no longer working,” says Robert Burke, founder and CEO of retail and fashion consultancy Robert Burke Associates, whose clients include Marc Jacobs, Chloe and Nordstrom. Still, he says that brands are eager to learn from creatives who have the agility and tech know-how to take more risks.
“Fashion brands tried just streaming a runway show, and it didn't work. So now they're faced with these new ways of using technology to appeal to the customer,” Burke says. “Shows have evolved to where it wasn’t just about selling items or looks. It was about creating an experience. All of the big houses had been able to travel to destinations. To do that today — needless to say, that's not going to happen. So how do they replicate that? It's an interesting question. The brands are really struggling with it”.
The power of digital events is in their full potential
When entering the Fabric of Reality experience, guests moved down a winding purple carpet in a futuristic museum toward the exhibition hall. There, visitors could see and speak with the other guests' avatars and the designers, who were all attending from home. They could visit three separate portals to enter the worlds envisioned by Inglês, Charli Cohen and Sabinna Rachimova. Each show was a 360-degree immersive experience, including music and graphics, in addition to the fashion.
“We wanted to give people a sense that it is incredibly different — it can offer these similar feelings that you would have front row at an amazing show,” Drinkwater says. “To show you can experience a sense of adrenaline and excitement.”
Similarly, the designers of HFW presented collections in the ocean among fish, walking on water amid giant flamingos or on another planet entirely; when watching live, viewers could “like” and “react” similarly to watching an Instagram Live. “Digital is not there to copy/paste what you do in real life,” says HFW founder Evelyn Mora, who is also founder of the Digital Village.
But digital events are a way to return to extravagance while working remotely. McDowell, who had never designed a digital show or clothing before HFW, says the experience was like “opening the door of a new playground”. It also saved time and waste, he adds; digitally embroidering a cape with thousands of Swarovski-like crystals took an hour, versus months.
“Extended reality fashion experiences don’t replace the ancestral craft,” acknowledges Inglês, who created her garment using an HTC Vive Cosmos VR headset and a Google TiltBrush. “Instead, it opens a whole new dimension of fashion possibilities and future dreaming, allowing us to expand the wearable vocabulary in ways that become inclusive of our digital identities”.
Mixed reality experiences are still largely unfamiliar territory, and not many own headsets, says Tamara Shogaolu, founder and creative director of mixed reality studio Ado Ato Pictures. She also cautions creators from getting “distracted” by all the possibilities and overwhelming audiences. To that end, her agency, which will unveil a fashion VR experience this week, is currently working on six immersive experiences and only one involves a headset.
Viewers of HFW are able to purchase digital garments from the shows, although only a limited number of each was available, and have their images “dressed” in them. Ownership is transferred through a partnership with fashion-focused blockchain platform Lukso. This means that the owners can use the digital assets anywhere in the future — whether that’s dressing their avatar in a future VR experience or using it in a video game.
Helsinki is the first time a fashion week has created and sold digital versions of every piece, so it’s too soon to know how commercial this will be. Fashion-tech consultant Karinna Nobbs has already observed that the pandemic has opened up consumer eyes to digital fashion, but says there is still a missing “sustainable revenue opportunity” for brands
Collaboration and iteration are necessary
Each designer showing during HFW and The Fabric of Reality was paired with a digital expert with experience creating in the medium, which Mora says was crucial to success. Inglês, for example, worked with Stuart Campbell, who has created VR art for Marvel and Disney. McDowell worked with 3D artists from creative agency NDA Paris and Soldats Films to animate the videos and digital tailors from Scotomalab to create the garments. The creative process was similar to familiar methods: sending patterns to digital tailors with notes, reviewing, fitting and editing together, then selecting the music, models and venue.
He anticipates a knowledge gap being a limiting factor, and thinks fashion brands will increasingly turn to the gaming industry to recruit talent.
Digital experiences and assets also need standardised formats for adoption to accelerate. Lukso, which worked with HFW, aims to provide fashion with a unified infrastructure and standards for buying and selling digital goods. By securing each item on a blockchain and providing digital certificates of ownership, digital items can be limited in supply, which ultimately increases their value, says Lukso co-founder and managing partner Marjorie Hernandez.
Viewers “claimed” half of designer Patrick McDowell's 100 available assets in two days. “If fashion had more of an authentic storyline, they might see their businesses grow in ways they didn't expect,” he says. © Patrick McDowell
Fashion wants tradition, but brands must appeal to a new consumer
When Burke was SVP of fashion and public relations for Bergdorf Goodman, brands initially wanted to ban beauty bloggers from the store, wanting to maintain control over their narratives. They eventually came around, and he predicts that they’ll do the same for digital experiences — perhaps, he suggests, by curating VIP VR experiences for couture customers that foster emotional connections. “The successful brands have realised during this time, if they've created a personal experience or already have a good relationship, this VIP private shopping type of technique is what has paid off. There's a lot of opportunity in how they could appeal to their top clients,” he says.
Digital concepts, while they may feel foreign now, serve new customers, Hernandez says, and tech’s tradition of incremental updates allows ideas to advance faster. She encourages fashion to adopt that approach.
“The tech world is built around testing and putting it out there when it’s not perfect, and that is a different philosophy than fashion shows have,” Burke says. “There's great insecurity because you're judged on your ability to be creative in a seven- to nine-minute show.”
Patience is key, experts agree. The fashion industry will learn from this, Burke says, and will improve over time. “I don't think they've thrown in the towel because we don't know how long this is going to last, and will it ever go back? There's going to be a real opportunity for people who can help educate the brands on the possibilities.”