LONDON — The end consumer: Ignore her at your own peril.
Once a clubby event for fashion industry insiders — along with the inevitable celebrity contingent — the runway show is no longer the preserve of press, buyers and others in fashion’s food chain.
A growing number of designers and labels are opting out of the clunky seasonal selling schedule as they aim to satisfy a rising appetite for buy-now, wear-now collections. They are also throwing open their runway shows to the public, who clearly cannot get enough of the fashion spectacle.
“We had a lot of clients [after a show] saying, ‘When can I have this?’ and you almost don’t want to respond because the answer is: ‘In three-and-a-half months,’” said Henry Holland, designer of House of Holland. “It’s kind of an alien concept these days to tell people you have to wait for something.”
Related Articles
Holland also pointed out that a runway show is one of a designer’s “biggest marketing spends of the year…and if you’re not talking to a consumer directly, then what are you spending that money on?”
You May Also Like
A number of labels at London Fashion Week — among them Holland, Versus and Hill & Friends — are increasingly making their collections available to buy as soon as they’ve hit the runway, capitalizing on the news and social media buzz that a show generates.
“I have an imagination that all people are like me — they see something and they want it now,” Donatella Versace told WWD in June as she and Anthony Vaccarello presented the Versus collection in London, which has been available to buy since the show in September 2014. “I think for young people, it’s more and more important — it’s very old-fashioned to wait six months for a collection.”
Even if consumers cannot buy immediately, they still want to take part in the spectator sport that is the runway show.
Last week, Givenchy released 820 tickets to the general public for its spring show in New York on Sept. 11, while Ralph Lauren has teamed with the live-streaming app Periscope to beam its spring collection on Sept. 17 onto a screen in Piccadilly Circus as it unfolds live in New York. Burberry has long been live-streaming its runway shows and offering select pieces from the collection for preorder.
Many see the increased public access to the shows — and the faster delivery of the clothes — as a direct result of fashion show imagery flooding onto social media. Be it an Instagram shot of a designer’s first look hitting the runway, press coverage of celebrities in the front row, street style images of editors and stylists, or fashion blogs and TV shows, the buzz around the runways has transfixed the public.
This season, the British Fashion Council is opening an area in Golden Square in London’s Soho where members of the public can watch fashion shows being live-streamed just yards from London Fashion Week’s new base on Brewer Street.
Consumers will also be able to buy designer sunglasses, including an exclusive Burberry design, in a Sunglass Hut space — the eyewear retailer is London Fashion Week’s principal sponsor — and watch fashion films commissioned by the BFC. Visitors will also be invited to “hashtag” their social media posts from the space with #LFW or #GoldenSquare.
Caroline Rush, chief executive officer of the BFC, said she envisions the Golden Square project as “a vibrant place where you will get a great sense of fashion and also be able to see people’s’ immediate reaction to live shows.”
Rush noted that the organization came up with the consumer event after seeing how the buzz around fashion week drives retail traffic to the city’s shopping hubs of Oxford Street and Regent Street.
She believes consumers will get a sense of excitement from seeing collections months before they hit the stores. She described the “hype” around seeing a show as it happens, “particularly if you’re a big fan of one of the designers. It’s about coveting those items that you really want in your wardrobe.”
Rush added that seeing a show could inspire consumers in more general ways, as well. “It spurs you on in terms of new looks and colors…which will no doubt also support the trends into the high street.”
London-based designer Zoë Jordan decided to present an online short film for her spring collection, during New York Fashion Week, that her customers could view at the same time as press and buyers. Jordan said she believes the format “services the industry…while still being inclusive of the public and my audience.” The designer presented her collection through KCD’s Digital Fashion Shows platform, which is open for anyone to log on to. Some pieces from Jordan’s collection will deliver within a month, while others will land in stores early next year. Jordan said, however, that she’s just as keen to see customers’ reaction to the collection on social media. “Their opinion directly reflects ours and our retailers’ businesses.”
And some British designers believe their customer wants an even more direct connection to the collections.
Emma Hill, former creative director of Mulberry, and Georgia Fendley, who together are launching the accessories label Hill & Friends on Sept. 20, will make part of the collection available to buy immediately after their presentation. The designs will go live on Net-a-porter.com and their own site, hillandfriends.com, along with images from the presentation.
“The wait for product following a presentation is pretty frustrating,” wrote Hill and Fendley in a joint e-mail, adding that while their customer understands the long production cycle for hand-made luxury goods, “they don’t understand why you would share something you’re not yet ready to sell. Our solution is a blended approach, serving both the fashion calendar and customer preferences.”
Henry Holland took a similar buy-now, wear-now approach to his men’s collection. “We were getting so much attention and traction around the show on all the different channels, and yet we weren’t able to capitalize on it,” he said.
When the designer launched his first men’s wear collection in June, it hit shelves in stores such as Selfridges, Opening Ceremony in the U.S. and Galeries Lafayette in Paris and Beijing at the same time of his presentation at London Collections: Men.
During London Fashion Week, the designer will be experimenting with making some product available from his women’s spring collection right after his Sept. 19 show. Working with Visa’s Europe Collab program, he plans to incorporate a payment system into some of his designs and offer select members of the audience the chance to purchase an edit of the collection.
Some labels see quick delivery as an essential part of doing business today. Rosanna Falconer, business director at Matthew Williamson, said she was witnessing customers’ mounting frustration over delays in delivery.
“I’d get e-mails the day after the show, saying, ‘I would like look 6 for a wedding in March and look 10 for an opera in June,’” said Falconer. “I had to tell them ‘No, that won’t be arriving for six months.’ And by the time it came for the collection to be delivered, the customer had “half the time…lost interest,” she said.
As a result, the label has made the decision to do away with the traditional fashion show calendar. Starting next season, it will begin to present its collections on a buy-now, wear-now basis. The label will skip a presentation during September’s London Fashion Week, and in February will present a collection that customers will be able to shop immediately.
The presentation will also incorporate more of the label’s lifestyle projects — Williamson creates wallpaper for Osborne & Little — with more initiatives to launch in the next six months.
“We’re not trend-led. It’s more about producing hugely desirable clothes that will meet the customer’s expectations and lifestyle,” said Falconer.
The move to buy clothes immediately and wear them has also seen Matthew Williamson turn away from wholesaling to sell entirely from its Web site, meaning the label doesn’t have to work around buyers’ schedules. The company has also shut it flagship on Bruton Street as it transitions into an online-weighted business, supported by a London showroom.
For other brands, however, balancing the end-consumer’s appetite for buy-now, wear-now collections with retailers’ schedules has been proving tricky.
Sarah Rutson, vice president of global buying at Net-a-porter.com, notes “the sheer fact that customers are seeing product six months before it delivers to retail means they crave newness as soon as possible — immediately sometimes — which ultimately creates great demand for the brand. This is the nature of the beast, and we address it as best we can.”
Rutson said Net’s personal shopping team works closely with the buying team to place preorders for top clients following the shows, while at the same time “our buyers are placing new season orders in the showrooms.”
In addition to selling the Hill & Friends capsule collection in September, the e-tailer will also sell the Versus collection and pieces from the Moschino women’s spring collection right after they’ve hit the runway.
Regardless of whether a collection launches immediately or with a more conventional delivery time, Rutson said, “as we all know in retail, the earlier a collection delivers, the better it will sell.”
While labels are increasingly keen to speak to consumers, they still believe there’s a place for the runway show in its current form as an industry event.
“The theater and the performance element…of a runway show is so important to the industry,” said Holland. “I think the main changes are going to be in how shows incorporate the consumer.”
Matthew Williamson’s Falconer also sees a runway show, and the backstage and front-row imagery that come with it, as a “fantastic brand statement on a global scale.”
Rush said the BFC is approaching the evolution of fashion shows “with our minds very open.”
“I think things will change and evolve — at what speed and what pace, I’m not entirely sure,” she said.
Each season, the BFC also runs London Fashion Weekend, a shopping and fashion exhibition that takes places at the end of London Fashion Week, where designers including Amanda Wakeley, Christopher Raeburn and Phoebe English sell designs directly to consumers. Rush said she can imagine “blurring the lines” between the two events, and noted that the BFC has “lots of conversations with designers around the idea of doing consumer shows during fashion week.” She noted that the organization can see “continued growth,” in the consumer appetite for fashion week.
“Runway shows have become much more accessible and much more engaging for the consumer,” she said, “and the natural end to that is that they are able to make a purchase.”