Imagine This…Fashion Week Re-Invented.  

Change is constant.  The fashion industry knows that better than many industries.  Every season a new collection is created to entice consumers. 

The fashion industry faced a major change earlier this year when both the venue and the event sponsors synonymous with NYC Fashion Week ended.(refer to my Style Integrity Twitter post about the news).

The new management, WME/IMG, are working on re-inventing fashion week and the future of fashion.  

The NY Times article, “Fashion Week, Re-Invented,”  offers an extensive overview of the new management who owns, operates and represents the NYC fashion week.  Both the concepts and plans are imaginative, certainly strong possibilities for ways to view Fashion Week in the future. 

I have inserted a segment of the article below for an overview glance at the plans for “Fashion Week, Re-Invented.”

“Imagine this: There you are, relaxing in your favorite ergonomic recliner, flipping channels on your tablet or TV, sipping green juice or espresso or chardonnay, when you come across a program featuring Maria Sharapova, Emma Stone, Charlize Theron and Kobe Bryant.

They are sitting on a bench in a cavernous warehouse space, laughing and chatting by the side of a runway, when the camera cuts away to a backstage scene where the makeup artist Gucci Westman and the hairstylist Orlando Pita are transforming Karlie Kloss and Miranda Kerr into Amazonian goddesses, and maybe (just maybe) the photographer and Vogue regular Craig McDean is recording it all. Oh, and the Vine superstar vlogger Cameron Dallas shows up, too.  

Everyone is being interviewed, and it is as if you are right there, right then, right in the middle of the four-ring circus that is a fashion show. And you see the clothes — they could be by Jeremy Scott or Prabal Gurung or Monique Lhuillier — and you want the clothes (those celebrities look so good wearing the clothes), and you live the life vicariously and you can’t wait to keep watching.

This is the future of fashion — or one possible version of it, as imagined by WME/IMG, the entertainment and sports management behemoth that now owns, operates or represents 13 fashion weeks around the world, including New York, London and Milan (along with representing all the celebrities mentioned above).

Content.

“When we look at the world, we see fashion, sports, movies, TV, books: They are all just different aspects of global entertainment consumption,” said Ariel Emanuel, a chief executive of WME/IMG.

There will be streaming screens on 14th Street for passers-by to watch, and hours when consumers can pop into the building and hang with the fashion crowd. There will be a New York Fashion Week app that is free from both the App Store and Google Play that will live-stream the WME/IMG shows (among other things) to anyone in Kansas or California who wants a virtual front-row seat.

The company is in negotiations with ABC Family for a two-hour documentary that will follow seven fashion week figures, including a designer, a buyer and Lameka Fox, an IMG model, throughout the shows. And that is just the beginning.

A few weeks after the ready-to-wear shows end in October, WME/IMG will debut its first-ever network in an exclusive deal with Apple TV — the first such Apple exclusive. Entitled Made 2 Measure (M2M), the all-fashion channel will stream on demand, featuring an original M2M documentary series on designers, industry issues and trends, as well as classic fashion films and documentaries and new looks at the shows that took place at the WME/IMG venues.”  

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The lengthy article continues with extensive details on how IMG plans to re-invent Fashion Week across the global fashion cities.

Change is good.  Any change is met with resistance initially especially when creative artists are involved.  It will be interesting to see how these ideas unfold, and more significantly, how they may are received by all inspired by the fashion world.

September is a month of change.  Enjoy all the Fashion Week shows around the world!  

There is always inspiration & imagination!