Is the future of fashion events real or in streaming? At Milan Fashion Week, brands try to understand the new role of the digital format

Looking at the Milan Fashion Week calendar, the word "digital" recurs 42 times, including at least 17 fashion shows and 19 presentations that will take place only in streaming, as well as examples of phygital shows such as those of Moncler and Prada: the first will show the new Genius collection through a mini-metaverse and a show conducted by Alicia Keys simultaneously with four other locations around the world; the second instead organized a double fashion show, which will be held in Milan and Shanghai simultaneously with a cross-streaming that will show the audience of one event what is happening in the other. At the same time, when a brand like Gucci collaborated with miart, it chose to organize a streaming-free performance, as if to emphasize the importance of real life after a year of only digital events. Now that the long-awaited end of the lockdown has arrived, in short, fashion brands are trying to better understand the role of streaming and digital interconnections inherited from the pandemic after 2020.

Brands' use of live streaming today is contradictory and a bit schizophrenic – after all, it's still being experimented. If the digital format has not been abandoned, it is above all thanks to its ability to create a digital connection between brand and public, constituting an excellent compromise solution between the opposing needs of exclusivity and inclusiveness that the fashion industry has: for example, you can organize a show for about fifty people but make it available to a much wider audience. And the possibility of reaching new and larger audiences is perhaps the main advantage of the digital medium that brands do not seem to want to give up, especially in light of successful initiatives such as Louis Vuitton's FW21 show this summer: filmed in Seoul with the participation of BTS, the stream generated the record figure of 37 million views and 1.3 million mentions / engagement making it in fact the fashion show most viewed ever. A result that can only be achieved when streaming becomes a complement to the physical show, losing value when it represents the only alternative. If we were to find a flaw in the digital show format, there would undoubtedly be a partial inability to do justice to the difficult and laborious organization of a show.

And although forrester's senior analyst quoted in the essay, Xiaofeng Wang, says that livestreaming applied to retail may not be as successful in countries such as Europe or the United States or that it may have it in a few more years. Recently, for example, Telfar Clemens has potentially pointed to a potential future path: the New York desginer presented a streaming TV channel in which a QR Code will appear randomly on the screen and will allow users to buy the highly sought-after Telfar Bag – meanwhile the channel will broadcast content produced by the brand and videos created by members of its community by combining retail,  entertainment and community building in a new form and allowing the brand to counter bots and bootleggers.