How Smartphones Are Killing Off the Fashion Show

The first big show of New York Fashion Week will not take place in a traditional space. It is not even on the traditional schedule, which lists roughly 150 shows stretching from Thursday morning to next Thursday night.

Rather, it will take place in the behemoth environs of Madison Square Garden, will feature not only a clothing collection but also an album release, and will be attended by a select group of editors, critics and retailers, as well as a much larger group of ticket-buying consumers, who will fill out the more than 18,000 seats and who are paying up to $8,584 on resale sites for the privilege. (The official price of the tickets was $50 to $135.) For those who cannot make it, the show will be filmed and screened in theaters in 25 countries, including Macedonia and Australia.

The event is the debut of Kanye West's Yeezy Season 3 as well as the unveiling of his album "The Life of Pablo." While you could dism iss it as a distraction from the business at hand — a piece of theater from an outsider — something else is to happen three days later that casts the Yeezy experiment in a somewhat different light.

On Sunday, Diane von Furstenberg, the founder of the brand that bears her name and, as the chairwoman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a pillar of the fashion establishment, will hold her own "experience" over two floors of her meatpacking district headquarters-New York pied-à-terre (she lives on the top floor).

She will invite select guests to filter in and out for over an hour (or to stay and drink and schmooze) to see vignettes of Karlie Kloss and Gigi Hadid, among other major models, acting out real-life situations, choreographed by Stephe n Galloway, while wearing pieces from her new collection. Attendees will be able to talk to Ms. von Furstenberg and her team, and otherwise get up close and personal with the clothes in a way they never can with a runway.

And if that were not enough, when Burberry hosts its fall show in London one week later, it will be clad in nostalgia. Come September, the brand will abandon the concept of "spring" and "fall" and present combined men's wear and women's wear shows that will be panseasonal. The clothes will be in stores directly after the show.

The three events reflect a tipping point.

"Everyone drank the Kool-Aid for too long, but it' s just not working anymore," Ms. von Furstenberg said last week. "We are in a moment of complete confusion between what was and what will be. Everyone has to learn new rules."

This is turning out to be fashion's season of existential crisis. Suddenly designers are asking big questions about "purpose" and "effect," re-examining the system on which they rest. And they are doing it in the cold, blue light of the smartphone's glare. They are doing it, arguably, because of the smartphone's glare.

Complaints about the fashion show system, a monthlong twice-yearly four-country treadmill to see clothes six months before they reach stores, have been around for a long time: Fashion week is too tiring, too old-fashioned, too crowded. But while fashion people have largely complained about the effect the system has on their own lives and jobs and creativity, today's problems are driven by a force even more powerful than simple self-interest: financial interest.

Which is to say, the buying public.

Interviews with dozens of retailers, editors, designers and private individuals over the last few weeks suggest that women are experiencing product fatigue. After being inundated by images and live streams from runway shows, from awards shows where the items are worn mere days after they appear on the runway, and from ad campaigns (and the making of ad campaigns), by the time these customers see the clothes in stores, the dresses and skirts and suits seem tediously familiar. Old. Over.

Ken Downing, the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, said recently that he was showing a client a hot-off-the-delivery-van $11,000 embroidered jacket, only to have her wrinkle her nose and say, "But don't you have anything new?"

"It arrived the day before," he observed. But it had been online since last October.

The Law of Unintended Consequences

"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 b ack-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.

Sarah Rutson, the vice president for global buying at Net-a-Porter, said: "Our psyche has changed. It is all about immediacy."

Photo "Everyone has to learn new rules," said Diane von Furstenberg, above, who wants designers to move away from the current show system. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

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 anot her 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 neces sarily 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?"

What Happens Next?

Last December, the CFDA hired Boston Consulting Group to suggest changes to the show system. It has canvassed insiders for ideas and will release its findings in March. But as Malcolm Carfrae, the global head of communications for Ralph Lauren, pointed out, whatever the company f inds, it won't work without the buy-in of the entire fashion week universe, especially the European brands.

For an industry that pretends to embrace change, fashion is notably resistant to alteration. The last time it happened was in 1999, when the New York shows moved from being the final stop on the fashion week merry-go-round to the first, after a decision by Helmut Lang to leapfrog his show to the front of the line. Since then, efforts to change the schedule, such as Yohji Yamamoto's decision in 2002 to move to couture, left the designers as lone voices crying in the wind and were later abandoned, though perhaps this precedent is what has convinced the CFDA that it can lead the charge to change. Still, not every city's fashion week is on board.

Carlo Capasa, the chairman of the Camera Nazionale della Moda, the Italian fashion industry's governing body, mentioned the above problems and added, "Producing before showing doesn't avoid a leak, and it can cause a black market of information."

His counterpart in France, Ralph Toledano, the president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, expressed even more vehement reservations.

As a result, designers are casting about, with a gulf opening between bigger brands and more niche players, and between New York and London, and Milan and Paris.

Thakoon Panichgul, whose clothes are often worn by Michelle Obama, has stepped off the New York schedule, having sold a majority of his brand to Bright Fame Fashion and having decided to reinvent himself as a see now/buy now brand — as did the Bill Blass brand before him. Rebecca Minkoff is working in real time and will show her spring collection this week; fall will be shown by appointment.

In London, Matthew Williamson has also abandoned the official schedule and is turning to a direct-to-consumer model. Thomas Tait, a former winner of the LVMH prize for young designers, swapped a show for a presentation. Tom Ford, who has been part of London Fashion Week for the last few years, began experimenting with different options when he took his fall 2015 show to Los Angeles during Oscar week. Though he originally said he would do small presentations in New York next week, he recently announced that he would follow Burberry, and show both men's and women's wear together in September, the day the clothes are available in stores. He's sitting this season out.

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"We have been living with a fashion calendar and system that is from another era," he said.

Ms. von Furstenberg has no patience for those clinging to the past. "They are going to realize this is best for everyone," she said, noting that her show change was partly conceived as a test of her own principles. The "experience" approach has the added benefit of forcing an interaction with the clothes, instead of allowing viewers to watch them speed by through their phones. "And I am seriously considering a consumer-relevant show in September," she added.

She is also selling a select group of items straight from the runway. Ralph Lauren already does this, as do Versace and Moschino (though none to the extent Burberry and Mr. Ford will in September). Versus Versace has already moved to the see-now-buy-now model. Meanwhile, Vêtements, the buzzy Paris brand, said that next year it would move its shows to January and July and aim to deliver clothes in-season the month afterward, thus creating its own timeline and confusing the matter yet further.

"It is going to get worse before gets better," said Mr. Downing of Neiman Marcus.

Which is the risk of this when-to-show-what-not-to-sh ow fashion world angst. The irony is, amid the tension and mixed messaging, the consumer can only watch and check her phone, hoping that waiting for resolution won't be like waiting for Godot.

Source: How Smartphones Are Killing Off the Fashion Show