Next month, London Fashion Week Men’s will be replaced with a digital-only, gender-neutral platform living on LFW’s website, starting with a digital fashion week from June 12-14. In a landmark collaboration between big tech and fashion — with some tech companies new to fashion entirely — the platform will give members of the public and the trade access to interviews, podcasts, webinars and digital showrooms. Consumers can buy from existing collections and retailers can order for next season.

This announcement made a statement: the future of fashion shows will be digitised.

It took a couple weeks for Milan, and then Paris, to follow with digital overhauls of their own. (New York, which canceled its summer resort shows and postponed its men’s shows, has yet to announce a digital format.) The newly online Paris Fashion Week will show Spring/Summer 2021 Men’s July 9-13, and Milan Digital Fashion Week will follow on July 14-17.

While these fashion capitals are the most influential, the past month has already given a glimpse of what an all-digital fashion show or fashion week might look like. China’s Shanghai Fashion Week pivoted to a livestream on sponsor Alibaba’s Tmall e-commerce platform at the end of March, followed by G-Star Raw’s 3 April “Stay-at-Home Catwalk” and San Francisco apparel brand Betabrand’s quirky “Work from Home Fashion Show” on 15 April, among others.

By May 1st, YouTube hosted its first at-home fashion show livestream. The 32-minute amfAR fundraiser was organized by fashion editor Carine Roitfeld’s CR Runway. Produced in less than a week, it featured models including Karlie Kloss, Amber Valletta and Halima Aden walking at home as if on a runway. YouTube, which also served as the home base for Mexico’s first digital fashion week in April, is working with the British Fashion Council as it develops its new platform.

“The three big questions everyone is asking are: what’s in your show, how can you show it and when are you going to show it? The good news is that I know all of the questions. The bad news is I think we're all struggling to find the answers,” says Derek Blasberg, head of fashion and beauty at YouTube.

These new formats for showing and buying collections — if they even remain collections — force the issue on an industry already succumbing to the tides of change. What does a digital fashion week mean? And, crucially, what is the point of fashion week?

“The whole point is changing,” says the London College of Fashion’s Matthew Drinkwater, who heads its Fashion Innovation Agency. “There is always going to be that buying element — that's not going to disappear — but it is going to become drastically reduced.”

B2B becomes B2C

When London Fashion Week starts on June 12th, fashion fans will have access to largely the same experience that editors do, aside from a press and retail portal and digital showroom appointments. “People will look at that divergence between what you can do for a show as opposed to what you can do for a buying experience,” Drinkwater says.

Shanghai Fashion Week’s transition from an industry audience to a consumer one vastly expanded its reach, says Christina Fontana, head of Tmall fashion and luxury in Europe, with both local and international brands including Diane von Furstenberg and Rothy’s, who were already on Tmall, participating. New York handbag brand Welden co-founder Sandy Friesen, who is not on Tmall but is on Taobao, participated from her home in Connecticut. The week’s events garnered more than 11 million viewers and sold $2.8 million in merchandise during the livestreams. As stores were closed in China, it was “a breath of fresh air” for those brands, Fontana says.

Betabrand customers submitted videos walking at home wearing the brand’s clothing to appear in its show, with people from Nigeria and Australia submitting videos. “Since we have all been at home, we can have anyone join us live whenever we want,” says Betabrand creative director Marie Andresen. “It’s broken this barrier of distance that we inherently created because we thought we needed to.”

It’s not just about the clothes

YouTube’s “Fashion Unites” video included designer cameos, but the models wore clothing from their own closets, making the event more of a pep rally for the fashion industry than a moment to market new clothes. Digital fashion weeks will adopt a similar approach: podcasts and interviews will let brands join the conversation even without a new collection to show, while each fashion capital will reiterate its relevance. To wit: London Fashion Week’s new platform will put “storytelling at its heart” and serve as a “meet-up point”, according to the announcement.

“Ensuring that our designers have a platform and are front of mind to both trade and consumer audiences will be essential to survival,” says Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council. In addition to showing any collections, she says, the designers will discuss current issues such as sitting on stock, and the platform will be used beyond fashion week for purposes such as helping brands adapt to a fragmented buying period due to factory closures.

“We want designers to connect with new international and domestic audiences, grow their presence in different markets and reinforce their existing relationships with media and retailers. We want to give the audience of London Fashion Week a unique experience which is not just about fashion but also about music, art, film and design,” she says.

“Fashion week has evolved to be less about sales and more about marketing. It’s a designer's opportunity to showcase a mood or feeling or to take viewers on — and this word is so overused — but, a journey. Of course, the clothes are important. But right now, designers are looking to tell a story of brand identity,” Blasberg says.

Already, DVF’s participation in this year’s Shanghai Fashion Week was primarily a marketing-oriented trial to introduce the brand to a new audience, says Gabby Hirata, DVF’s head of business development for Asia-Pacific. The brand plans to lean into the livestream format, hosting one once a week in China and experimenting with different formats and styles.

Less structure

Because the consumer audience was able to buy the products during Shanghai Fashion Week, many brands chose to show products that were already available, rather than only what would be available in the future, Fontana says. London Fashion Week has expanded to be gender-neutral and season-inspecific, while Milan Digital Fashion Week will allow brands to choose which season to show and how they want to present it.

Four years ago, see-now-buy-now attempted to capitalize on the immediate momentum of a consumer audience. But that largely fell flat; it was hard to pre-produce collections and work with buyers to anticipate demand. Brands were stuck in limbo, instead turning to limited-release “drops” throughout the year. Meanwhile, relaxing gender norms has rendered strict gender-based prescriptions obsolete. But it took a pandemic to give “permission” to brands to make these transitions.

Drinkwater anticipates an ongoing erosion of parameters, seasonal or otherwise. “Seasonality has been disappearing for some time, and now more than ever, it's time for us to finally say goodbye to that and allow the creative expression from designers to sit within their timeframe or what feels right for their consumers or their audience — not to what the industry dictates it should be,” he says.

Rush says that the BFC will continue to develop this platform, created with Amazon Launchpad, over the next editions of the event. In September, for example, she envisages a similar structure, in which some menswear labels participate and — hopefully, she adds — there is a smaller-scale physical element.

Audience participation is key

Shanghai Fashion Week viewers could comment and “like”, click to buy or watch designer interviews. This both keeps the events more engaging for consumers and provides instant feedback to brands. Hirata, of DVF, says this interactivity was the most exciting and useful component. Similarly, Betabrand’s broadcast included live commentary and chat, plus a shopping option, using a proprietary platform inspired by a combination of live-streaming gaming service Twitch and home shopping channel QVC, Andresen says.

The upcoming fashion weeks will include live events. Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, for example, will organise content in a calendar with slots for each brand, with private industry webinars and live-streaming keynotes. This invites audience participation — a key tenant of virtual events in the entertainment industry. Travis Scott’s Fortnite concert on 23 April, for example, was seen by almost 28 million viewers, who could interact in the experience.

“What we have learned from doing concerts is that you have to go beyond. It’s not enough to drag and drop in something that exists,” says Adam Arrigo, CEO and co-founder of virtual entertainment company Wave. The company has produced virtual concerts for Lindsey Stirling, Tinashe and Galantis and is working on one with John Legend. The performer wears a motion capture suit, and their movements and voice are transformed as an avatar within the experience, which can be viewed on multiple platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. Wave can also sell virtual or physical merchandise, and create an in-experience VIP space that is private.

Individual viewers are usually represented as their own avatars within the experience, and can interact with various elements. For Stirling’s concert, each audience member was represented with a star. For Tinashe’s, audience members voted on outfit changes and songs. When viewers are represented physically in the space, it gives them a sense of presence, Arrigo says. “Otherwise, it just reminds us that we are trapped inside.”

Drinkwater says this shifts the narrative from storytelling to “story living”. Designers, he says, instead of just telling people what they are doing, can “put them inside that world”.

Walking the runway will become obsolete

Paris’s digital fashion week will tell brand stories through a collection of films. Blasberg says that filming a traditional runway and adding some cameras backstage is not unique. He points to Balenciaga’s water-soaked runway, Gucci’s non-traditional format and even the Spike Jonze-directed Opening Ceremony play in 2014 as precursors to the creativity that is possible digitally. “Those were examples of not just, you walk into a pretty room and you see models go backwards and forwards. They were more experiential, and this crisis will prompt people to accelerate those plans,” he says.

This could begin with small-scale improvements, such as a formalised version of the at-home format, in which a designer sends clothes to a muse who records content to create a single-person show — an approach taken by Mexican designer Vero Díaz this season.

And, of course, digital tools mean that filming people walking might not be the most inspiring approach long term. “You miss the mark when you are trying to recreate a runway experience in someone's home — that is the easiest way, but the audience tunes out after the voyeuristic thing pretty fast,” says Krystal Hauserman, who, as VP of marketing and communications at social content company Fullscreen, leads the team that designs experiential events. “Right now you have a lot of creative filmmakers and storyboard artists sitting at home clamoring for something to do.”

Going forward, Blasberg is thinking about what a show looks like in 360-degrees or in augmented or virtual reality. “Fashion Week has lived the way it has for so long because it serviced our needs. This is the first time Paris Fashion Week has been disrupted since World War II,” he says. “It's important to support these brands. We are indebted to the industry for creating content, for engaging our viewers, for offering some escapism at a time when people probably need that more than ever.”

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This article was ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN VOGUE; Written by Maghan McDowell