Fashion lawyer Elouise Davis trained in Melbourne and lives in New York. Here, she shares her insights into how the industry is adapting to change.
From a room at the Mercer Hotel in New York, Marc Jacobs shared his views on the future of fashion during a webinar hosted by Vogue Global Conversations.
Jacobs was joined (virtually) by emerging Nigerian designer Kenneth Ize, followed by a discussion on sustainability with Stella McCartney and Gabriela Hearst.
Over the subsequent days, industry-leading creatives and executives from a slew of major brands spoke on the continuation of fashion shows, e-commerce and bricks and mortar in a changed industry.
On creativity, Ize expressed that “the show must go on” even in isolation, and was excited at the prospect of facing his supply chain’s new challenges with a fresh perspective.
While Jacobs has been forced to cease production on his Fall 2020 collection amid the Coronavirus’ toll in Italy and in the absence of usual retail orders, Ize’s Nigerian workforce of weavers is less reliant on technological manufacturing.
This has enabled the brand to continue production of its trademark woven garments from workers’ homes, despite Nigeria’s shutdown having paused most commercial activity.
An LVMH Young Designer finalist, Ize is good at selling his brand’s story; he speaks to how his time in quarantine has enabled the reinvention of an old-fashioned loom.
He plans to incorporate this into his upcoming collections, manifesting the outlook shared by Virgil Abloh (of Louis Vuitton and Off-White) that the story behind the clothes is much more heartfelt and authentic in a time when we have all shifted to consuming online.
The designers were split on the continued importance of fashion shows in a post-Coronavirus era, but consistent that the answer isn’t as simple as merely virtualising the fashion show experience and streaming it online.
Ideas thrown around were as wild as Balmain’s endorsement of a ‘global fashion month’; an Olympics-style event that moves between different fashion capitals and changes the format of the fashion calendar entirely.
While Ize expressed doubt that fledgling brands like his own can gain retailer confidence without the publicity and validation gained from showing at Paris Fashion Week, he was lauded for his use of Instagram.
Ize streams his market appointments virtually from a friends’ Parisian apartment over a formal showroom even before the large scale onset of the pandemic.
Jacobs (whose celebrated Fall 2020 collection closed New York Fashion Week in February) was less keen on a dependency on screens to present fashion in a post-pandemic market, fearing that increased technology will exacerbate consumer-fatigue and waste in an already overcrowded fashion calendar.
Jacobs would prefer a maximum of two shows a year, saying that “we’ve done everything to such excess that there is no consumer for all of it. And everyone’s exhausted by it…and so no one really appreciates it. It’s all become a chore, and it’s a chore that’s just a waste of time and energy and money and materials.”
Waste was a concern shared McCartney and Hearst, who stressed the urgency of waste-management as a top priority change for the industry made even more immediate in light of the current crisis.
While both designers agree that it would be disappointing to see the industry return to its pre-pandemic pace of peak-consumerism, Hearst expressed hope that operating in the present environment of unprecedented external stresses is preparing the fashion world for a new normal, in which brands work within the constraints of sustainable fashion.
It’s all about parameters, she explains, and shifting one’s state of mind to work within limitations to create products that are made well and will last.
McCartney – the reigning queen of sustainable luxury – stressed that shifting towards sustainability can even mitigate unforeseen supply chain disruption. Her manufacturing operation is far less susceptible to the challenges put forward by Jacobs, because it works so much further in advance of the rapid runway-to-retail speed of the ready-to-wear industry.
McCartney urged that emerging from the pandemic with anything less than a mindfulness that we consume too much, that waste has spiralled out of control – and without a conscious outcome – would be a great disservice to an industry desperately in need of change.
“This is an absolute reset button moment in the history of earth as we know it,” McCartney went on. “This is a time to enter back into normality in a new way…We can do better.”
The worst that could happen to us is a return to the same normality.
As put by Chloe’s Natacha Ramsay-Levi, it’s imperative to remember that the industry didn’t choose this break from the fashion calendar.
We didn’t all get together and actually opt to make the changes at an industry level that have been murmuring among consumer sentiment in recent years.
This is an unchosen time of reflection, and it’s what brands choose to do with this pause that will determine who will make the list of relevant brands of the future and who will get left behind in a pre-COVID world.
Pictured: Empty streets in New York, as lockdowns continue.