London Fashion Week Goes Digital & Gender Neutral

The British Fashion Council (BFC) have announced that for the next twelve months womenswear and menswear will merge into one gender neutral digital platform.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak London Fashion Week Men’s usually scheduled for June will be a digital-only event running for its usual duration from the 12th June 2020. The digital platform www.londonfashionweek.co.uk will relaunch and will be for both trade and consumer audiences. The platform will host exclusive multimedia content from designers, creatives, artists and brand partners, enabling collaboration and bringing together fashion, culture and technology.

Caroline Rush CBE, BFC Chief Executive commented: “It is essential to look at the future and the opportunity to change, collaborate and innovate. Many of our businesses have always embraced London Fashion Week as a platform for not just fashion but for its influence on society, identity and culture. The current pandemic is leading us all to reflect more poignantly on the society we live in and how we want to live our lives and build businesses when we get through this. The other side of this crisis, we hope will be about sustainability, creativity and product that you value, respect, cherish. By creating a cultural fashion week platform, we are adapting digital innovation to best fit our needs today and something to build on as a global showcase for the future.  Designers will be able to share their stories, and for those that have them, their collections, with a wider global community; we hope that as well as personal perspectives on this difficult time, there will be inspiration in bucketloads. It is what British fashion is known for.” 

The new digital line-up will no longer be gender specific and will work as a meet-up point, offering interviews, podcasts, designer diaries, webinars and digital showrooms, giving the opportunity for designers to generate sales for both the public and retailers.

Earlier this year Shanghai Fashion Week and Tokyo Fashion Week both held digital events to global online audiences. The coronavirus outbreak has thrown the fashion industry into disarray with cancelled orders and trade events, unfinished production and a huge drop in sales. It has been a real wake-up call with questions being asked about overconsumption and the excessive amount of stock produced. What will the next chapter be for the fashion industry? And is it time for the rise of slow fashion?