The catwalk shows may have moved from New York to London, but the trends are being set in Silicon Valley. London fashion week's welcome speech, customarily given at Somerset House by Samantha Cameron or Boris Johnson, was instead beamed live from the Mountain View office of Google director Peter Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald may not have the star power of Cara Delevingne, but the British Fashion Council (BFC) believe he is just as key to the profile and success of this week's shows.
Fitzgerald revealed that his team had held pre-fashion week “digital bootcamps” with London's designers, at which “they were each challenged to do one thing digitally, this fashion week, that they had never done before”. He was introduced by Natalie Massenet, the BFC chair – who had just returned to London, not from New York fashion week but from Cupertino, having prioritised attending the unveiling of the Apple Watch over the Manhattan catwalk shows.
The carrot with which Fitzgerald and his team are tempting designers online is that “the designers who are digitally engaged are doing two to four times better than those who aren't,” he said. When the BFC launched their digital campaign within the industry a year ago, 33% of designers had e-commerce websites. That figure has grown to 43%. “Our target is 100%. And I believe we will get there,” said Massenet. After all, she has more than a decade of experience in how a partnership between fashion and the digital world can be mutually advantageous. The founder of Net-a-Porter, she sold the online fashion retailer in 2010 for an estimated £50m. She retains the role of executive chairman at the company.
British designers stand to benefit from the digital age more than those from any other fashion capital because of the democratising power of social media. The London fashion week schedule is overwhelmingly populated by designers running small-scale businesses, without the finances to run advertising campaigns or to open their own stores. “For so many designers, it is social media that really opens opportunities,” says Caroline Rush, CEO of the BFC. “Social media is free. And e-commerce is much, much cheaper than a bricks-and-mortar store, so designers are able to sell on their own terms [rather than through a multibrand boutique] much faster than they used to.”
Meanwhile, the few heavyweight brands on the London fashion week schedule have each raised their digital game this season, as the contest to stage London's most forward-thinking fashion show hots up. Topshop is looking to harness the rising importance of Instagram in the fashion community, “putting the Instagram community at the heart of the show experience”. During the last London fashion week, in February, more than 100,000 photos were posted with the LFW hashtag. The livestream of the Topshop Unique show on Sunday will combine catwalk footage with photos from five influential Instagram users who will each document the event in their own style, offering online viewers varying perspectives on the collection.
Burberry have secured a powerful tech ally in Twitter, who will debut their buy button when the Burberry collection hits the catwalk on Monday. Burberry's 3.1 million Twitter followers will be able to buy the nail polish used on the catwalk models direct from a tweet. Burberry has invested enormous money and time in building social media relationships, through such innovations as the tweetwalk, introduced three years ago, whereby each model's look was tweeted to Burberry's followers from backstage before it appeared on the catwalk. The buy button is a step towards converting those relationships into sales.
The first of the 82 designers to present their spring/summer 2015 collections was Korean-born Jackie JS Lee, a Central Saint Martins graduate and previous winner of the prestigious Harrods award, whose small label is based in east London. Her aesthetic is sleek minimalism, with a soft edge. A navy silk jumpsuit was worn under a matching blazer, with the subtlest flash of orange at the back vent. There was a nice balance of soft femininity and crispness in the way fluid silk tailoring was finished with shirt collars, and neat shift dresses finished in dipped hemlines. With diverse casting of models on the catwalk, the show made an appropriately forward-thinking opener for a London fashion week focused on the future.
