The next London Fashion Week will be entirely digital and gender-neutral

The crisis that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought has upset all the plans of the fashion system, overwhelming the calendars of fashion shows and fashion weeks with a wave of cancellations and missed appointments. Brands have responded to the problem by transferring all their initiatives to the digital world and, as in the case of Shanghai and Moscow, turning the fashion week shows into live-streaming shows. Today the British Fashion Council has announced that London Fashion Week will also become entirely digital and gender-neutral, with a dedicated platform that will host shows, presentations and interviews. Here are the words of Caroline Rush, executive director of the BFC:

“It is essential to look at the future and the opportunity to change, collaborate and innovate. 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. 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.”.

The digital platform that Caroline Rush talked about will be an upgrade compared to those seen at fashion weeks in Shanghai and Moscow, first of all positioning itself as an official channel of the British Fashion Council through which designers will be able to share, in addition to their work, their narrative and their aesthetics, radically changing the experience of fashion week as we know it and giving the public a type of access never seen before to fashion shows and the world behind them, thanks to interviews, podcasts and behind-the-scenes of the fashion shows. The schedule of the shows will generally respect the same set of dates and appointments of a physical fashion week with the only difference that the presentations of the men's and women's collections will take place together and not divided, as had happened until now.

The first digital and gender-neutral London Fashion Week in history will begin on June 12 and continue for a week. It will be an event of enormous importance, through which you can predict the future of the entire industry – a fashion week radically different from everything we had seen before, without front row, without influencers and without locations, organized according to concrete parameters of efficiency (such as the decision to present men's and women's collections together) and able to bring together in the same platform both the needs of buyers and press and those of an audience of spectators the first time will be included in the viewership of individual events together with fashion insiders and will be able to take advantage of a quantity of digital content and insights that will decisively mark the relationship that the fashion world will have with the public.