Open season: Covid’s impact on the fashion industry’s rhythms

Fash­ion weeks used to make sense. The way they were sched­uled – about six months before the clothes on show would be deliv­ered to retail­ers – enabled man­u­fac­tur­ers, buy­ers and jour­nal­ists to plan effec­tive­ly. But things have changed. For one thing, these hith­er­to elit­ist affairs have been democ­ra­tised through the access afford­ed by the inter­net, dri­ving the consumer’s desire for instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. For anoth­er, cat­walk shows have become enter­tain­ment events, with many of the gar­ments exhib­it­ed nev­er mak­ing it into pro­duc­tion.

Both the tim­ing and the man­ner of ever more localised fash­ion weeks can feel remark­ably anti­quat­ed, giv­en that their premise is to show­case the new. Many indus­try insid­ers have been argu­ing that the sys­tem has long been bro­ken. Could the Covid cri­sis be a dri­ving force for change?

Rachel Jones is a lec­tur­er in fash­ion busi­ness man­age­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­min­ster. She notes that high­er-end brands have “felt pres­sured by the speed at which trends spread, and by the break­down of sea­son­al­i­ty that online shop­ping has caused, to show and deliv­er at an ever more break­neck pace, even though pro­duc­tion times can be squeezed only so much. This has accel­er­at­ed the col­lapse of the tra­di­tion­al six-month­ly cycle, which start­ed when well-financed brands began intro­duc­ing inter-sea­son col­lec­tions.”

Jones con­tin­ues: “The break in the sched­ule that Covid made nec­es­sary looks to be the chance to reset the system’s tim­ings. It has giv­en cat­walk brands a kind of per­mis­sion to break free and try things in new ways that are more con­ve­nient, com­pet­i­tive and cur­rent.”

Exploring a technological fix

The use of livestream­ing has been one response. The world’s first fash­ion week of any sig­nif­i­cant scale to go ful­ly dig­i­tal, Shang­hai Fash­ion Week, reached more than 11 mil­lion livestream view­ers in March 2020, for instance. Anoth­er has been the replace­ment of tra­di­tion­al media with Insta­gram and oth­er social plat­forms. 

By rely­ing on either of these mar­ket­ing chan­nels, brands cede con­trol of the nar­ra­tive to the con­sumer – a con­sumer who’s more vocal­ly crit­i­cal and impa­tient for the goods to be deliv­ered. This fac­tor has inspired ‘see now, buy now’ direct-to-con­sumer pro­grammes of vary­ing effec­tive­ness. Many brands that have tried to shrink the gap between show and prod­uct avail­abil­i­ty in this way have tend­ed to see an increase in online inter­est and foot­fall rather than actu­al sales.

But oth­er brands are try­ing more rad­i­cal approach­es, opt­ing out of the tra­di­tion­al fash­ion cal­en­dar alto­geth­er. Lon­don-based design­er Mary Katrant­zou, for instance, runs a cou­ture col­lec­tion in par­al­lel with a sea­son-less, all-year-round col­lec­tion that she launched dur­ing the first nation­al lock­down. 

“Tak­ing the courage of my con­vic­tions has shown me how you can be lib­er­at­ed from the relent­less pace of the fash­ion cal­en­dar and take the time need­ed to devel­op prod­ucts, which I, as an inde­pen­dent design­er with­out huge resources, find vital to cre­ativ­i­ty,” she says. “There’s an accep­tance that things need to change. Many design­ers are feel­ing freer to show their col­lec­tions in dif­fer­ent ways. Show­ing, for instance, is increas­ing­ly about com­mu­ni­cat­ing val­ues to the con­sumer. Work­ing with buy­ers has become some­thing sep­a­rate from that, espe­cial­ly as they’re increas­ing­ly look­ing to buy all year round too.”

Breaking free from the calendar

The pan­dem­ic has prompt­ed brands of all sizes to reap­praise their approach to show­cas­ing and pro­duc­ing. Yves Saint Lau­rent, for instance, last year announced plans to shun the tra­di­tion­al cal­en­dar and show on its own terms. 

Ermenegildo Zeg­na, one of the biggest brands of high-end menswear, has shift­ed its approach towards what its artis­tic direc­tor, Alessan­dro Sar­tori, calls a more hybrid mod­el. He’s scep­ti­cal of the ‘see it, buy it’ approach – “it’s fake, because real­ly it’s based on pro­duc­tion orders just being kept on hold” – but con­cedes that, giv­en the influ­ence of fast fash­ion, there is increas­ing pres­sure now to “get the fresh­est and right col­lec­tion to the con­sumer at the right time”, result­ing in a need to short­en the pro­duc­tion cycle. 

This can­not be done at a cost to qual­i­ty, he stress­es, so Zegna’s new approach is to deliv­er a series of ‘wardrobes’ through­out the year, with small­er pro­duc­tion runs allow­ing these to be clos­er to deliv­ery dates (in turn enabling a bet­ter and less waste­ful response to mar­ket needs), while retain­ing the tra­di­tion­al six-month cycle for gar­ments requir­ing spe­cial fab­ri­ca­tion.

“You can do part of a col­lec­tion in two months – tex­tile mak­ers and cloth­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers can gen­er­al­ly cope with that – but not all of it, so you end up with a blend­ed sys­tem, which strikes me as more appro­pri­ate for the fash­ion mar­ket of tomor­row,” Sar­tori argues. 

And as for pre­sent­ing the col­lec­tions? It says much that he has been busy in recent weeks shoot­ing about 8,000 pho­tos of more than 1,000 looks, while also mak­ing a series of short films. 

“This is sim­ply about using dig­i­tal media in a more clever way,” Sar­tori says. “If you have the dig­i­tal means of show­ing almost every aspect of a gar­ment, why do you need a cat­walk show? The whole industry’s dynam­ic needs to change, but a big push is still need­ed to make that hap­pen.”

Will the big push come?

Paul Alger, direc­tor of inter­na­tion­al affairs at the UK Fash­ion and Tex­tile Asso­ci­a­tion, reck­ons that some ele­ments of the sup­ply chain remain “in denial about the issue” and that change may be com­pro­mised by com­pet­ing inter­ests. Retail­ers want to buy clos­er to the sea­son – with many now so cash-strapped that they’re push­ing for sale-or-return con­tracts that small cloth­ing firms can’t eas­i­ly finance – while tex­tile mak­ers, which oper­ate on longer lead times than design­ers, are pan­icked about their plan­ning. 

If the fash­ion cal­en­dar were to be short­ened, “man­u­fac­tur­ers could cope”, he says. “The ques­tion is whether they’d like it. But many com­pa­nies have been oper­at­ing on a short-order basis for longer than peo­ple might realise. And, while change might cre­ate uncer­tain­ty in the sup­ply chain, the chal­lenge for all play­ers in this indus­try is to be as flex­i­ble as pos­si­ble.”

Yet not every­one believes that change is nec­es­sary, or desir­able – at least, not when con­sid­er­ing fashion’s place in cul­ture. Menswear design­er Oliv­er Spencer thinks that, while the six-month­ly cycle may not work for the high street or the cus­tomer, it still works well for more con­sid­ered cloth­ing – not only in terms of qual­i­ty, but also in terms of eth­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal­ly sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion. 

“If you espouse the idea of slow fash­ion and pro­mote mak­ing things that last from a sus­tain­abil­i­ty stand­point, it’s impor­tant to stick to the cur­rent sys­tem,” Spencer argues. “The high street may be able to oper­ate on a faster one and many con­sumers want instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, yet many oth­ers are ques­tion­ing the big­ger impact of that now, espe­cial­ly since Covid. In the longer term, the out­come will be gov­erned by how slow fash­ion grows.”