Digitised Fashion Shows and Fashion Weeks in the COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 Era: The Changing Formats and Meanings of Communicating Fashion

Wang, Zhe ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8540-3930 and Xu, Yana Jessica (2023) Digitised Fashion Shows and Fashion Weeks in the COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 Era: The Changing Formats and Meanings of Communicating Fashion. Fashion Practice: the journal of design, creative process and the fashion industry. ISSN 1756-9370 (In Press)

Accepted Version File not available for download. Download (1MB)

Abstract

The passing 3-year pandemic had a significant influence on how we communicate fashion especially on the showcasing system. Since the first complete open-to-public online fashion week staged in the Autumn/Winter 2020 at Shanghai, numbers of new creative disciplines are created to develop more diversified vehicles for designers being able to showcase their new collections free from the geographic barrier. Adding the context of the rise of metaverse as an external acceleration, this paper introduces and analyses the new creative disciplines of showcasing fashion in a virtual context that have become further noticed since the pandemic and how these new practices have revolutionised the orthodox perceptions of communicating fashion from a global perspective. The research acknowledges China’s pioneering role in establishing a digital fashion production and presentation system. It also highlights that the increased digitisation of fashion presentation, catalyzed by the pandemic, has fundamentally altered the dynamics and aesthetics of fashion communication. This transformation has shifted from a grassroots, bottom-up revolution or trickle-up process driven by bloggers and consumers to a top-down approach initiated by authorities, beginning with the restructuring of mainstream fashion weeks. This shift has ushered in a new era of fashion democratization with the rising post-human aesthetics, both in theory and practice, as viewed from an academic perspective.