milan fashion week

London Fashion Week will become a gender-neutral digital platform

The British Fashion Council just announced that it will merge London Fashion Week women’s and men’s edition into one gender-neutral digital platform, beginning at June 12. What will it look like and how will designers respond to these changes?
Cover photo: © Pexels

London Fashion Week

London Fashion Week is known for its bold street style and funky designers who perfectly mirror their Zeitgeist. However, this year everything will be different. Not only at London Fashion Week, we guess. Now that production has come to a stand still and events get canceled, Fashion Week organizations have to adapt their plans. The British Fashion Council is one of the first doing this, presenting their plans in a statement earlier today.

For the next twelve months, all fashion shows will be canceled and broadcasted online – streaming is possible via their website. The statement read:

“London Fashion Week June 2020 will put storytelling at its heart and give a voice to British fashion businesses and creatives, allowing them to tell their stories in these extraordinary times by tapping into London’s cultural zeitgeist and highlighting its position as a global multi-cultural city. Bringing the fashion community together, the platform will host exclusive multimedia content from designers, creatives, artists and brand partners, enabling collaboration and bringing together fashion, culture and technology.

Positive aspects

This new fashion week will be open to the public and features podcasts, interviews, shows, presentations and so on. Caroline Rush, Chief Executive of the British Fashion Council added:

By creating a cultural fashion week platform, we are adapting digital innovation to best fit our needs today and something to build on as a global showcase for the future. Designers will be able to share their stories, and for those that have them, their collections, with a wider global community; we hope that as well as personal perspectives on this difficult time, there will be inspiration in bucketloads. It is what British fashion is known for.

The good thing is that this way of presenting doesn’t make traveling necessary. It wil save tons of water, fuel and will heavily reduce its carbon footprint. The COVID-19 crisis forces the fashion industry to make far-going changes – changes that were already much-needed.

Curious about which designers will show at London Fashion Week? Check out the original schedule.