Bringing the fashion community together, the British Fashion Council activates its digital platform
London Fashion Week (LFW) takes a new form, a digital-only platform launching on 12th June and merging womenswear and menswear. The digital platform, London Fashion Week is freely accessible globally for both the public and trade audiences, embracing the cultural commentary and creativity for which British fashion and London are known.
LFW Digital – Overall Highlights
With an aim to bring the fashion community together, the platform hosts exclusive multimedia content from designers, creatives, brand partners, media, retailers and cultural institutions enabling collaboration and bringing together fashion, culture and technology. This new digital experience will work as a global meet-up point, offering interviews, podcasts, designer diaries, webinars and digital showrooms, providing the opportunity for designers to tell their stories and share their experiences from the last few months.
Along with the LFW schedule, the British Fashion Council (BFC) also released the new data from Oxford Economics, reinforcing the importance of the fashion industry to the UK economy. In 2019, the British fashion industry directly contributed £35 billion to the UK GDP, a 9.38% increase from 2018, with the number of people employed by the industry remaining constant year on year at 890,000 (source: Oxford Economics).
Despite last year’s growth, the impact of COVID-19 on the fashion industry is considerable, as 73% of fashion businesses have already experienced order cancellations. Which is why, now more than ever, the BFC acknowledges the necessity to look at the future of LFW and the opportunity to drive change, collaborate and innovate in ways that will establish long-term benefits, develop new sustainable business models and boost the industry’s economic and social power.
London Fashion Week Digital, June 2020
The platform showcases over 100 designers on the LFW digital platform. 34 designers are part of the official LFW schedule while over 33 also feature on the Explore section, with either new content or assets from their current collections, along with many more activating profiles for a presence on the platform. Additionally, 34 retailers, 23 media and 6 brand partners from around the world are activating on the platform through their unique content. The new LFW digital platform has three main streams: the LFW Schedule, the Explore Section , the Designer Profiles.
The LFW Designer Profiles – You may visit the link to see the participating Designers
The Class of 2020 – as part of its ongoing commitment to supporting education and fashion students, BFC asked 13 colleges and their students, along with BFC graduating scholars, to create content to tell their stories, featured in the Explore section
What is most exciting is the technology behind this digitalization: Joor, the wholesale fashion digital platform for both brands and retailers, will offer Virtual Showrooms for LFW. Smartzer, will offer its interactive technology that makes any content into interactive and shoppable. Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat and Pinterest are offering their traditional online tools.
We are hopeful that the digital equivalent will be as good as the physical shows of LFW.
Image & Video Credits: LFW / British Fashion Council, U.K