Fashion World Atwitter Over Burberry's Show System Shake-Up

Hold onto your $1,295 clutches: Burberry this morning announced two changes in the way it does business that the New York Times tells us is “perhaps the biggest shake-up of the fashion show system since ready-to-wear took to the catwalk.” 

First, starting this fall, it’s eliminating two of the four shows on its calendar and the September and February shows will feature both womenswear and menswear collections. Second, the collections will be available to purchase in-store and online immediately following the shows. 

“Burberry’s shift could be the snowflake that begins an avalanche of change as designers, retailers and fashion organizations debate the overheated fashion system; the future of shows; social media; the growing move to mobile and e-commerce shopping from brick-and-mortar, and how to energize a consumer who seems gripped with ennui when it comes to fashion,” writes Samantha Conti for Women’s Wear Daily.

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“In other words: The show will become a big marketing and selling tool, not for department stores or glossy magazines, but for direct communication between the brand and the men and women who want to buy it,” writes the NYT’s Vanessa Friedman. “That’s kind of a big deal.”

It is certainly an acknowledgement that blogosphere, vlogosphere and twittersphere are elbowing Paris, Milan, London and New York as the nexuses of fashion decisions. And, as Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour says in a slightly different context in a revealing story by Ravi Somaiya in the New York Times last week: “Those who want things always to stay the same are not living in the real world. It’s like perfection. Doesn’t exist.”

What does exist, nowadays, is immediacy between maker and buyer that need not be mediated by professional arbiters of taste and style.

“The changes we are making will allow us to build a closer connection between the experience that we create with our runway shows and the moment when people can physically explore the collections for themselves,” Burberry chief creative and CEO Christopher Bailey says in the release signaling the change. “Our shows have been evolving to close this gap for some time. From livestreams to ordering straight from the runway to live social media campaigns, this is the latest step in a creative process that will continue to evolve.”

This also means that the collections will be a “seasonless mix of styles” — a process that has been evolving since the start of the year, Burberry says, “as the Brit, London and Prorsum lines merged into one new ‘Burberry’ label designed for a worldwide audience.”

In an interview with The Business of Fashion’s Imran Amed, Bailey says, “It often felt slightly superficial to be talking about an autumn/winter collection, when it’s 90 degrees in a third of the shops we’re selling it in. We are a global company and the world is not one weather pattern.”

The company’s supply chain “will now be designing and manufacturing simultaneously, as opposed to one leading to the other,” Forbes contributor Rachel Arthur tells us. “Wholesale partners will also have to work more collaboratively, and be trusted to work to new embargoes set by the brand. But Bailey says it will also provide opportunities to create exclusives for certain stores and special events for their VIP customers.”

The global nature of the business today has its downside, too.

“Burberry, like many other luxury retailers, has been battling to overcome falling sales in the once-popular malls of Hong Kong, as shoppers from mainland China stay away amid fears over an economic slowdown and after the pro-democracy protests held in the city in 2014,” points out the Financial Times.

“Burberry's announcement comes as the fashion industry is facing a major shake-up following similar announcements by New York brands Thakoon and Rebecca Minkoff, as well as the CFDA's announcement that it has hired Boston Consulting Group to look at the different options designers have to make their fashion shows more consumer facing,” Scarlett Conlon observes for Condé Nast’s British Vogue

“Other designers — most notably Thomas Tait, Tom Ford and Matthew Williamson — have also changed the way they operate in the last year when it comes to showing their collections, with no doubt more to follow suit following Burberry's big news,” Conlon continues.

It will be interesting to see how the immediacy of the collections changes the media that covers the industry — and its advertising pages. But, as Wintour says in the kicker to Somaiya’s NYT story: “If we sit back with our quills and the visors on and, you know, the old kind of printing presses that I used to see with my dad” — who edited The London Evening Standard — “what is the point of thinking that way? Come on.”

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