Can the Digital Fashion Show Stake a Permanent Claim?

If the official presentation for a major fashion house’s latest collection happens online with no social media influencers on the front row to post about it or celebrities in attendance to be photographed outside the venue, did the show really happen at all?

A modified version of the classic “If a tree falls in the woods…” proverb which so reduced Bart Simpson to rapturous, empty-headed enlightenment back in 1990, this is a question which conventional wisdom had – until recently – seemingly not felt the need to address. Everything, after all, was in its place: established models for what a Fashion Week and, subsequently, a fashion show ought to look like seemed sustainable enough, even as the influencer economy at large seemed to be sleepwalking into the era of its inevitable decline.

Yet here we are, in the second month of 2021, just over a year into a global pandemic which has challenged – and, in some cases, completely and utterly destroyed – so many of the customs and protocols we had considered to be unassailable. Coincidentally, we also find ourselves in the midst of what is, by all accounts, the first fully-digital mainstream Fashion Week – slightly less than a year since the Fall/Winter 2020 Fashion Week in Milan which notoriously became something of a superspreader event.

Of course, it’s not a coincidence at all. The two things are, very obviously, connected: while attempts at socially-distanced Fashion Week events were held back in September, the transition to online-only presentations this year is clearly a response to the difficulties and failings of those events. In short: we tried. Now, it turns out, we need to try something else.

That being said, the two aren’t so entwined that one can’t – or shouldn’t – exist without the other. And so it begs the question: when the COVID-19 pandemic does draw to an eventual end – and I think “when” rather than “if” is probably a healthier approach to this for the sake of everyone’s dwindling mental health – does the age of the Digital Fashion Week necessarily have to die with it?

The more progressive answer, of course, is “No. Obviously not.” There are, very clearly, plenty of reasons to keep Fashion Week firmly rooted in the realms of the URL for the foreseeable future, with only the bare bones of in-person infrastructure in place, which have nothing to do with coronavirus specifically. And, of those reasons, the most convincing and most pressing – as it tends to be – is environmental impact.

A report by the fashion tech company ODRE, released what now feels like a lifetime ago, back in 2020, puts the annual carbon footprint of Fashion Week into head-spinning perspective. As the sustainability agency Eco Age conveniently and soberingly summarises in their write-up of the dossier: “the industry emits 241,000 tonnes of CO2 a year just from travel costs associated with the quarterly fashion months.” That is, they note, “equivalent to the annual emissions of a small country, or the electricity used by 42,000 homes for a whole year,” or – as Alden Wicker wrote for a piece on The Cut, aptly titled Fashion Week Is Not Sustainable – “enough to power Times Square for 58 years.”

Let that sink in. Okay? Okay. Now consider that those numbers don’t even take models, influencers or press into account – only buyers and designers; the bare minimum. The real carbon cost of Fashion Week over the course of a year is, it’s safe to assume, significantly higher.

Which leads us, conveniently, to another point of interest in terms of taking a progressive approach to the industry: fostering inclusivity within, encouraging the further transparency of, and – as an end goal – the democratisation of Fashion.

Digital Fashion Week is, necessarily, significantly less exclusive than its in-person counterpart: the only real gatekeeper to experiencing these presentations on the same level as journalists, influencers or celebrities – who, yes, may still have gotten goody bags and fancy invitations because sustainability is a much bigger issue than just travel – is a working internet connection. While presentations have been live streaming now for some time, it has always been at most a second-tier experience: you could watch the action from behind a screen, but you knew that there were people on front row and elsewhere in the room doing more than just watching – that there were people, those on the inside, living it in all its multi-dimensional sensuous glory and with no delays or glitches. There are no bandwidth issues when you’re sitting next to the runway.

These are, to my mind at least, fairly convincing arguments. But they’re arguments as to why Digital Fashion Week could or should stick around post-COVID as part of radical change within the industry.

As for whether or not they will – well, now – that’s another thing entirely and a much more complicated question. Fashion Week, after all, is a micro-industry and micro-economy all of its own: there are livelihoods, particularly in the hospitality and travel sectors, which can be made or broken by a successful Fashion Week. Anyone who has been to any of the major events can tell you what it’s like trying to book a hotel or restaurant when Fashion descends upon a city en masse, and the people – people outside of the industry complex – who rely on that economic boost should not be a forgotten casualty.

More than this, though, as Virgil Abloh made clear during the presentation of his Fall/Winter 2021 Menswear collection for Louis Vuitton, Fashion – with a capital “F” – relies on the concept of insiders vs. outsiders and prides itself on exclusivity and gatekeeping. It’s this attitude, more than anything else, that will keep Digital Fashion Week events from becoming the norm as we move forward – or, rather, as certain elements of the industry try to stop that forward motion from making any meaningful change.

While nothing is for certain, two things seem clearer now than ever. Firstly, that only once that attitude is rooted out are we likely to see any tangible disruption to the status quo. And secondly, most importantly, just how essential that disruption is.