“Social media is the laxative of the fashion system,” said Scott Galloway, the founder and chairman of the digital consultancy L2. “It makes everyone digest everything much faster: trends, product discovery.”
The digital world has schooled an entire generation — called the IWWIWWIWI generation (I want what I want when I want it) by the New York consultancy Open Mind Strategy — in immediate gratification. Though the Twitter-Instagram-Facebook-Snapchat nexus started as a golden promise, a way for brands to seize control of their own messaging and cut out the middlemen of retailers and critics and communicate directly to their customer, it has created a situation in which it is no longer acceptable to many women to wait six months for something they have just seen. Especially if they can get an acceptable simulacrum at a fast-fashion brand down the street, like Zara or H&M, which was able to spot the garment via pictures and measure its success via the number of “likes” it achieved.
And this has been confused further by the back-and-forth promotion of what is shown on the runway (products for the next season) versus what is in stores (products from the current season), and exacerbated by the rise of precollection marketing in between.
“In the past, we used to see a dramatic spike of sales when the collection was delivered to stores; that trend is no longer really the case,” said Paolo Riva, the chief executive of DVF.
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Sarah Rutson, the vice president for global buying at Net-a-Porter, said: “Our psyche has changed. It is all about immediacy.”
However, as she pointed out, the fashion world is on a schedule that demands that retailers be shown a collection months before it can be sold, as they have to place the orders and wait while clothes are manufactured. And magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar have a three- or four-month lead time. Fashion week has traditionally served as the fulcrum for this — and fashion week has developed a set of stakeholders that have nothing to do with fashion per se, but that are heavily invested in its continuity: the municipal industries that are ancillary beneficiaries of the influx of capital associated with fashion. According to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, for example, fashion week is worth close to $900 million in total economic impact each year, including an estimated $532 million in direct visitor spending. Its impact is similar on the other three fashion week cities: London, Milan and Paris.
So on the one hand you have an immovable system of four interlinked geographies, and on the other you have “consumers and digital platforms that did not get the memo that fashion has four seasons,” Mr. Galloway of L2 said.
Though various possibilities have been floated about what to do to address the gap, with the most popular being a combination of a small industry-centered presentation for retailers and glossy magazines, followed by a “consumer relevant” (Ms. von Furstenberg’s words) runway show closer to the time the clothes would be available in stores, there is no clear answer. For every designer or retailer who thinks the one-two option is a good idea, there is another who thinks it is terrible: too costly, too focused on the commercial.
“I think it’s so preposterous, I haven’t even discussed it with my clients,” said Pierre Rougier, an owner of PR Consulting, who works with brands like Hood by Air, J. W. Anderson and Louis Vuitton. “It’s a very dangerous, slippery slope, because you can’t have a consumer-relevant show that features clothes stores have not bought. So what you see becomes what the store likes. You are effectively taking the designer out of the center and replacing him with the retailer, and new ideas do not exactly thrive at retail.”
What may work for a large brand with manufacturing muscle and its own retail stores will not work for a small brand. What may work for retailers will not necessarily work for designers, who see runway shows as the opportunity to state their vision of their clothes and who often experience collection antipathy as soon as they finish one. Consumers aren’t the only ones who get tired of clothes after they’ve seen them for too long.
“I hate everything I did yesterday,” Alber Elbaz once told The Financial Times. “I have to; otherwise how would I have the energy and drive to do something today?”
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