The Undoing of Fashion Weeks: Temporary or the End of an Era?
Hello and welcome to the 40th issue of moderated, a newsletter created to dive into insights and phenomenons of the Fashion Industry. It also has a curation and summary of the most talked about last week’s events of the industry, offering further readings for more details.
If you are new here, welcome! I hope I can somehow help you to keep up with the fast-paced Fashion Industry.
Also, subscribe to receive a weekly issue by e-mail…
In this week’s moderated, I dived into this season’s messy fashion month calendar and how this can impact the future of fashion weeks.
But before jumping into the main article, check the last week’s recap of the Fashion Industry.
Last Week’s Recap
Uniqlo Passes Zara as the World’s Most Valuable Apparel Brand
Remember when, in 2014, Uniqlo’s parent company Fast Retailing said it wanted to be larger than Zara? Here we are, they are doing it. The value of Fast Retailing reached US$103 billion last week, passing Zara's parent company Inditex’s US$99 billion market capitalisation for the first time. This is mostly attributed to the fact that Uniqlo has 60% of its stores in Asia, where the market is recovering faster, while Zara “only” has 20% of their retail in this continent. This advantage made investor put their cards on Fast Retailing, which raised the company’s share prices by 80% in the last 12 months.
…
Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire Are Launching Saudi Arabia Editions
ITP Media Group has announced that both magazines Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire will have Saudi Arabia editions. They will be available from March 2021. Both publications will be bilingual and run by an ITP editorial team based in Riyadh. The magazines' launch will be accompanied by exclusive private events throughout the year such as luxury VIP soirées, dinners, and practical workshops.
…
Paris Is Set to Pass New York as the World’s Leading Fashion City
According to a Vogue Business commissioned ranking by IFDAQ, Paris is set to overtake New York as the world’s leading fashion city by 2025. Specialists are attributing this shift to two main factors. The first is Brexit taking London from the competition to be the ultimate centre of fashion in Europe. The second is that the two largest luxury fashion groups in the world are based in Paris and becoming stronger every day.
To create this ranking, four key aspects were taken into account: general economy, fashion economic performance, market capitalisation, and industry influence. These factors take into account infrastructure, GDP, brand presence, wealth, consumption power, and creative power.
The ranking also stated that London will pass Milan and rise to the third. This shift was more attributed to the weakening of Milan’s fashion scene, rather than the rise of London’s one. The two other cities outside the big four that were a highlight were Shanghai and Moscow.
The Undoing of Fashion Weeks: Temporary or the End of an Era?
Remember when people cared about fashion weeks?
A new fashion month started and it has been so loud that some people didn’t even notice it did. Besides how unimportant these digital fashion weeks are becoming, they are also transforming into a mess. I was planning on writting about NYFW in this newsletter, but apparently, the event will only be over in April. Yes, April.
The traditional fashion "week" in New York, then London, followed by Milan and Paris is falling apart for good this season. New York Fashion Week even changed its name to American Collections Calendar, because shows are spread out around February, March, and even April, while many brands, especially from the Kering group, are not taking part in any fashion weeks. I am even having a hard time figuring out how to write about each fashion week in an organised way - and I am not alone. The calendar for this fashion month is so chaotic that Launchmetrics, which usually releases data analysis per fashion week, is doing an overall analysis at the end of the fashion “month”. Is this undoing of Fashion Weeks temporary or the end of an era?
.
The Traditional Calendar Is Fading
My initial plan for this week was to write about New York Fashion Week, which started on the 14th of February and would usually last a few days. Even in September 2020, already in Corona times, New York Fashion Week had a clear structure and timeline. Those days are apparently over – for now. New York Fashion Week Calendar is so spread out around the month, with brands and designers presenting collections until April and others hosting shows far away from the Big Apple, that the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) renamed the event to American Collections Calendar.
That’s kind of major. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were many discussions about the fashion calendar and how it should be changed. It became such an important topic, that a group of brands and designers made an open letter to the industry about it. Around one year later, this is kind of slowly happening for good. Kering’s brands like Saint Laurent and Gucci were some of the first to announce they would no longer follow the fashion calendar, which meant not hosting runway shows during fashion weeks. Then many others followed with similar or other strategies – all ditching a part of the traditional calendar - such as Mugler and Off-White.
The last fashion weeks, be those ready to wear or haute couture, all had some iconic brands missing from the schedule. Some did leave the timeline due to complications around Covid-19, like ateliers closures, but some just don’t see a point on it anymore. Then we finally arrived at this season, which is traditionally the autumn-winter 2021 collections season.
The first fashion week, the New York one, is a complete mess. Zimmerman streamed a show from Sidney, probably due to travel restrictions and the pandemic. Nothing drastic, everything is online anyways. But we also have Carolina Herrera, Coach, and Christian Siriano presenting later on the month, outside the traditional one-week-ish (usually less) timeline. Tom Ford is also hosting later on the month, but because of a Covid-19 outbreak at his atelier. Then we also have Alejandra Alonso Rojas, Oscar de la Renta, Altuzarra, and LaQuan Smith only showing their collection in March. On top of that, we have Jonathan Cohen, who dressed First Lady Jill Biden on inauguration day, scheduling his presentation in April (check the complete calendar here). Indeed, calling it New York Fashion Week did not make any sense anymore.
To be fair, this movement for change at the New York Fashion Week was something in the build even before the pandemic, which intensified it. Alexander Wang had dropped the traditional fashion calendar since 2018, while Tommy Hilfiger and Tom Ford were already exploring shows at other locations. For the CFDA, expanding the concept of New York Fashion Week is an opportunity of seeing US designers and brands on a global stage. I get that, but honestly what made this season a mess is not being spread around the globe. It is being spread around the calendar.
Entering the other three fashion weeks from the big four, the timelines are more organised, but not really. Versace is showing during Paris Fashion Week, but it not affiliated with it. Kering’s brands Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga are all doing their own thing, showing anywhere at any time, sitting out of any official calendar. Everything is going to be digital and no one is really excited about it. Done, I said it.
.
Digital Fashion Weeks Lost their Appeal
It was fun at first, when we had to adapt to Corona times and brands were releasing their collections in creative fashion films or interesting live events that somehow brought something new to the table. It was still not the same as physical fashion weeks, but it was interesting to watch how brands and designers were dealing with the restrictions of the pandemic and doing their best to keep their creativity alive. It was new, not seen before. Now, in my opinion, is just getting boring.
With a few exceptions, watching countless videos of collections got repetitive and tedious. There was something about the buzz of physical fashion weeks. The street style, the celebrities, the forecast of what we may be wearing soon. Seeing all this content around social media about it, posted from different points of view. There was an element of surprise of who would attend each show, who would post about it. All that was kind of lost in the digital format. I do believe many brands are doing a spectacular job with the circumstances, but still, overall, digital fashion weeks got...lame?
Think this is just my opinion? Well, I’ll give you some data then. There were 18,192 tweets that used the hashtag #PFW around Paris Fashion Week between Sept. 28 and Oct 6, 2020, an 87 percent drop from the 139,403 tweets using the hashtag #PFW between Sept. 23 and Oct. 1, 2019.
Digital fashion weeks don’t create the same impact physical ones did. And I believe data from this season will be even more drastic because I don’t see anyone talking about the current fashion month on social media.
The digital format also revealed that established brands don’t need the fashion week schedule to create a buzz. For example, according to ListenFirst, the runway livestream that generated the most YouTube views in 2020 was the desert-themed Saint Laurent women’s show for spring 2021. The show was uploaded to Youtube in the middle of December, more than two months after Paris Fashion Week. As Lisa Grant Damico, director of account management at ListenFirst, explained to WWD:
“Yves Saint Laurent has 16 million fans or followers on social media — they can reach their audience on social media about a new collection without needing the amplification of a formal fashion week.”
The same could be seen for other social media giant brands that did not affiliate with any fashion weeks last season, such as Dolce & Gabbana and Jacquemus. The lack of appeal of digital formats is actually creating a problem for the smaller brands and designers.
“It’s the smaller brands without a built-up social media audience that benefit the most from participating in fashion weeks, and are suffering in the absence of in-person ones,” Grant Damico added.
.
Temporary or the End of an Era?
That’s a great question no one knows the answer to. I can’t fully answer this question, but I can give you some insights about it. Once Covid-19 is in the past, we are for sure returning with physical events. On the side, digital will probably remain an important factor of collection presentation, especially after all fashion weeks created digital platforms and customers got used to having access to this content.
However, going back to “normal” fashion weeks may be very different than what we had before the pandemic. I do believe there is a chance Coronavirus changed the fashion weeks’ format way too much. With so many relevant brands dropping out of the fashion calendar and others not basing shows in the same cities every season, fashion weeks are dismantling and the point of it all is getting a bit lost. If everything will happen everywhere in the world, at any date, wouldn’t it be easier to just create a global calendar so buyers and media can organise themselves differently? I am not saying that’s what should happen (I personally love fashion weeks), but right now the whole structure is too chaotic and pointless.
I love to think things will change and we will have a revolution in fashion. But, most probably, fashion weeks at the main four capitals will slowly regain strength and everything will be almost the same as before in no time. Still, I do have something in me saying the change went too far to just go back to how things were. If anything, we will have Moscow and especially Shanghai fashion week coming out of this stronger than they were before.
As for me, I will be here trying to figure out how to bring fashion weeks' content to you despite this mess of a calendar (not sure yet how, but stay tuned).
Thanks for reading this week’s moderated and next Tuesday I will be back with more.
If you haven’t already, subscribe below to receive the moderated newsletter by email.
Also, share this post with friends and family - and don’t forget to leave a like at the heart at the end of the article! :)
Bye-bye and see you next week!
About the author behind the text
About the artist behind the illustrations
If you want, send suggestions, comments, or a hi to luizapplima@gmail.com