London Fashion Week Goes Digital

Fashion : News

10 June 2020

When lockdown first hit the UK, the June iterations of fashion weeks were so far out of sight that the thought of an interrupted schedule was as unexpected as the country still being in lockdown three months later. But here we are, at the start of summer without the usual feeling of excitement-cum-anticipation of a month filled with men’s fashion excellence.

Having said that, the British Fashion Council have made it their mission to continue the show. This weekend, which would be the usual slot for London Fashion Week Mens to take place, the physical shows have been replaced with a gender-fluid and completely digital LondonFashionWeek.co.uk: a digital platform that will be amplifying digital fashion content throughout the weekend.

The schedule – which the BFC announced yesterday – includes beloved menswear designers, Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, RAEBURN and Nicholas Daley, alongside London womenswear show staples like Natasha Zinko and Preen By Thornton Bregazzi. As well as buyers, editors and the general public having a chance to see what the designer’s have in store for SS21, the site will also be a platform for live interviews, webinars, podcasts, playlists and a new series named ‘Designer Diaries’; where seven LFW designer’s share behind the scenes pics and video clips of how they continued to create clothing during lockdown.

Being the first fashion week within Europe to go completely digital – a digitised Shanghai Fashion Week launched in April and Tokyo Fashion Week opted to live-stream their March shows – the BFC have adapted to our bleak circumstances and are pioneering a new fashion week format. We may slightly miss the spectacle of a catwalk show, but this interlude of innovative content is equally creative as a form of storytelling, and will keep our palettes satisfied while we wait and see what September has to offer.