The Catwalk Is Morphing
When they watch a fashion show with models on a catwalk, most people wonder: who is ever going to wear that?! The answer is nobody, sometimes. Next to dazzling evening dresses and elegant tailleurs for working women, there are also trashy parodies and eccentric sartorial creations that are impossible to wear, and sometimes even look bad on models, never mind ordinary women.
In fact, the aim of certain clothing items is not selling, but projecting dreams and creating buzz around the brand to make the news. The catwalk will then be followed by sales in the showroom, where buyers will be able to examine a wider supply range with respect to the fashion show. Only the fashion items that reach a minimum amount of orders will be put into production, while the others will be dropped. In other words, extravagant creations are little more than prototypes. Therefore the true function of the catwalk is not doing business, but communication and marketing, by attracting media attention on the brand every six months, and benefit from the huge coverage fashion events still enjoy.
However the transformation of the catwalk from business to image tool raises certain questions. First of all, if the fashion show is not about selling, for communication purposes, is thhe 6-month delay from catwalk to store that traditionally regulates the world of fashion still justifiable? For example, at the end of February/ beginning of March all the fall and winter collections are shown, but this confounds consumers who will have to wait for six months before they can buy them. Wouldn't it be more effective if they were able to buy immediately the dresses and suits they seen on the catwalk? Fashion brands like Burberry and Moschino have started experimenting in this direction, by enabling people to buy the clothes being shown on the catwalk in real time, much earlier than those same clothes will actually be available in stores. The Council of Fashion Designers of America has commissioned a study to the Boston Consulting Group to redefine the future of fashion shows: they have to assess whether shows synched with deliveries in department stores are doable; if this happened, the link between models on the catwalk and sales in the showroom would be severed, and this would be a Copernican revolution for the fashion business.
Also, since the catwalk is about brand promotion for final customers, why not opening the event to all those who are potentially interested to be in attendance, possibly paying serious money to be there? Last September, coinciding with its New York landing, Givenchy let in 280 students of the Fashion Institute of Technology to its fashion show, as well as 720 people who had reserved a ticket online. There are also those who have disposed of the catwalk altogether: last December, Tom Ford issued a press release saying that the company would no longer take part in London men's fashion week, but it would show women's and men's creations at private meetings with the press and buyers during the New York fashion week. It was soon followed by other brands, which are pushing for a return to the showroom away from the catwalk. And this is just the beginning.
The Milan Fashion Week revolving around women's fashion will open this February 24. It will take place in a fluid market scenario where the defilée, created at the end of the 19th century as the showcase for fashion, is starting to show all its years and must then be rethought. Let's hope Italian brands will grasp the occasion to start discussing a new vision for fashion events, in order not to be passive spectators before the aggressive marketing strategies of Anglo-Saxon brands.