Milan kicked off its first Digital Fashion Week on Tuesday with two live runway shows on the schedule, including from heavyweights Dolce & Gabbana, to send out a message of “positivity.”
Running through today, this “phygital” fashion week — featuring both physical and digital shows — will present the Men’s Spring/Summer 2021 collections, as well as men’s and women’s pre-collections, with about 40 brands answering the call. This is the third such show after London and Paris and Italy’s first fashion week since the coronavirus crisis.
Starting off the week was MSGM, with Italian designer Massimo Giorgetti presenting a colorful collection in a video short full of pep, showing young people having fun at a carnival, canoodling by a lake or gazing into each others’ eyes, with the motto: “I don’t know where, but together.”
Photo: REUTERS
Also Tuesday, Prada presented a video in five chapters, the work of five different artists including US filmmaker Terence Nance and video artist Martine Syms, featuring a stark, mostly black and white collection. Despite its cinematic format, the final chapter was none other than a filmed runway show. The clothes are “simple... with a use and a value” because “when times become more complex, the clothes become straightforward, unostentatious,” the Italian house said in a statement. Presentations from Moschino and Philipp Plein were set to follow, while on Wednesday it will be the turn of the Italian firm Etro and D&G, who will both be on the catwalk for real, in-person fashion shows.
“We decided to present the collections with a physical fashion show to give a strong positive message, fundamental at this time for the fashion system and the city of Milan,” Kean and Veronica Etro wrote in a statement.
“Real interaction is fundamental to fashion.”
Photo: REUTERS
Etro will be hold its show at the Four Seasons Hotel located in a converted 15th-century convent, while D&G has chosen the gardens of the university campus of the Humanitas Hospital, which has been involved in coronavirus research and which the fashion brand supports financially.
Last month, Sicilian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana announced their return to the Italian Fashion Chamber (Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana) and to the official calendar for the first time in more than two decades. Differences with the management of the shows had prompted them to leave the system in 1998. The chamber’s president, Carlo Capasa, called it “a great return”.
Capasa, who said the fashion industry anticipates a sales drop of between 20 to 30 percent this year due to coronavirus, said on Tuesday that the shows hoped to “give a message of positivity and energy” to the industry. “The fact that so many brands participate in our Fashion week... gives a message of hope and trust in our industry,” Capasa said.
DIGITAL VS REAL
The week continues with Salvatore Ferragamo, Tod’s and Dsquared2 yesterday and closes today with Gucci, Ermenegildo Zegna and Missoni. To accommodate buyers, the chamber will offer live appointments round the clock over various time zones. In addition to the fashion shows, brand presentations, interviews and backstage sessions, virtual “theme rooms” will cover a wide range of topics such as sustainable development, diversity and technological innovations. Two other digital events, International Hub Market and Together for Tomorrow, are dedicated to up and coming designers. It remains to be seen how buyers and the media react to Milan’s hybrid fashion week. The Paris shows that ended Monday were presented in video, with some critics saying the new format fell somewhat flat.
“Digital has a long way to go — light years — before it can replace the live fashion event,” wrote fashion trade paper Women’s Wear Daily, citing “the genuine, enjoyable intimacy of actually ‘being there’” for a one-time-only fashion show.
Barring a new wave of coronavirus, Milan is expected to return, for the most part, to physical fashion shows for its Spring-Summer 2021 Women’s collections from Sept. 22 to 28.
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
Indigenous Truku doctor Yuci (Bokeh Kosang), who resents his father for forcing him to learn their traditional way of life, clashes head to head in this film with his younger brother Siring (Umin Boya), who just wants to live off the land like his ancestors did. Hunter Brothers (獵人兄弟) opens with Yuci as the man of the hour as the village celebrates him getting into medical school, but then his father (Nolay Piho) wakes the brothers up in the middle of the night to go hunting. Siring is eager, but Yuci isn’t. Their mother (Ibix Buyang) begs her husband to let
The Taipei Times last week reported that the Control Yuan said it had been “left with no choice” but to ask the Constitutional Court to rule on the constitutionality of the central government budget, which left it without a budget. Lost in the outrage over the cuts to defense and to the Constitutional Court were the cuts to the Control Yuan, whose operating budget was slashed by 96 percent. It is unable even to pay its utility bills, and in the press conference it convened on the issue, said that its department directors were paying out of pocket for gasoline
On March 13 President William Lai (賴清德) gave a national security speech noting the 20th year since the passing of China’s Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法) in March 2005 that laid the legal groundwork for an invasion of Taiwan. That law, and other subsequent ones, are merely political theater created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to have something to point to so they can claim “we have to do it, it is the law.” The president’s speech was somber and said: “By its actions, China already satisfies the definition of a ‘foreign hostile force’ as provided in the Anti-Infiltration Act, which unlike
RSS