Every Fashion Week season, The Practice team notice an influx of innovative technological displays. Last time around, we noted the rise in trends including Google Glass, digital shows, and live streaming.  But does fashion’s embrace of mass and online culture mean the devaluing of an art-form?

Certainly, many critics and journalists alike are bemoaning fashion’s prominent move into “low-brow” territory, citing the rise of social media and exponential technological growth as the primary culprits. Whilst this may be somewhat the case, the fact remains that the fashion industry must, like any other, move with the times if it is to sustain itself in a global market.

Fashion Journalist for the Financial Times, Vanessa Friedman, takes criticism with the fact that several designers place greater emphasis on the small screen, as opposed to how models are seen in reality. She states: “One designer I know is so focused on live streaming that she casts models according to how they look on camera as opposed to how they look in person when they walk.” It is true that the most powerful clients, editors, and brand ambassadors will be in attendance at such shows, yet designers are also savvy entrepreneurs who know that their largest reach and audience is to the online market. Furthermore, with the front-row now occupied by the “super-bloggers” and “Twitteratti”, never before has it been more important to showcase a product on a model that looks exemplary on screen.

While Friedman doesn’t take heed with fashion’s commercialization, she makes light of the issue that adding a digital element allows greater viewership numbers, but not necessarily sales; in effect, we’re beginning to see shows merely as spectator events rather than business and purchasing opportunities. To an extent, we at The Practice agree, and yet it is surely impossible to quantify where leads are coming from; to our mind, greater publicity online and offline can surely not be harming sales, if that is the aim of the game. The second problem she poses is that clothes don’t translate well from runway to screen: the movement of fabric, the curves and lines- these have to be exaggerated to create the same effect. Columnist for the Times, Suzy Menkes, agrees: “I felt uneasy about the difficulty of analyzing fabrics, recognizing true colours and allowing my own eyes to follow the pieces that interested me,” she states following streaming the shows on her iPad.

Looking at this, we definitely envisage problems for a creative industry if fashion is to move solely to the online space; yet as long as the demand for live fashion shows remain and work in tandem with the online sphere, there is a win-win situation to be had for designers, journalists, and everyday consumers. After all, fashion’s online presence also benefits global media agencies such as KCD, who launched their Digital Fashion Shows last year to allow journalists to view collections online if they can’t catch them personally. And aside from this, e-commerce retailers now have the opportunity to utilize online runway videos to entice buyers. Several sites already continuously add these to their product pages so consumers can see how their potential purchases will look in movement.

Will you be heading over to Fashion Week to catch a glimpse of the action, or attending any shows yourself? And do you think fashion stands to lose some of its exclusivity to the accessible digital space? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and check out our Facebook page.