DONNA KARAN: THE FUTURE OF FASHION SYSTEM.

Our friend at Curious Foodie has invited us (by us I mean you and me. Your opinion in the comment box is a sign of your unconditional love for me.) to join in a dialogue regarding the future of what seems worth discussing. Oh yes, let’s make this space even more heated; one or two angry soul won’t hurt anyone only me. So, lets speak of the collaboration of fashion bloggers and the fashion industry in general.

Earlier this month, Donna Karan sat down at Parsons discussing the future of fashion (and indirectly discussing about how bloggers are affecting the industry). She took the words right our of my mouth:

In the movie industry, the consumer doesn't know about the movies until they're ready to come out. Why do we give the consumer so much information about fashion six or seven months beforehand? It makes no sense to me. We need fashion shows, but that's industry, it's not for the general public. All the communication has to stop. It doesn't go out on the wire, it doesn't go out on the Internet, it doesn't get out for the manufacturers to copy the designs. I mean, we're killing our own industry. There's too much information going out there. We have to learn the word restriction.

As much as I hate to disagree because as a blogger getting information beforehand is how we obtain the ‘blogshere status’ but, the truth is and you’re ignorant if you have not seen it yet, we are killing our own (fashion/fashion blogger) industry. My theory is simple – we’re taking the advances of today’s for granted. It only takes one designer to reach out to a certain blogger and affect the whole system. Unknowingly to some designer these marketing strategies of theirs might have ripple effect to the rest of the industry.

I mean hello, a journalist who had been working for 30 years sitting behind a girl whose age is barely half the years of the journalist’s experience at a fashion show? Not only we are destroying the fashion industry but also the traditional media and our blogsphere. Haven’t you notice that fashion bloggers are becoming twitter-ers now? And that we don’t speak our mind anymore because some of our souls are sold to a certain brand.

Now even your neighbor’s cat can ‘love’ fashion. Why? Because brands are making it easier for the general public with the advance of technology via live streaming. Live streaming really? Now that luxury fashion no longer means anything, do we really need to share this exclusivity with everyone too?

To upstage one another, fashion houses/brands are planning on various marketing plan. Haven’t you heard that Burberry is live streaming in 3-dimesional? I am against the idea mainly because manipulating our visuals of the clothes just doesn’t seem right. I call that daylight robbery. Introducing this might just reduce the quality of what was a great craftsmanship because these new method of showing clothes can hide flaws and enhance anything.

As a blogger I know that it is a contradiction, for me to say this but I truly believe that with live streaming, minute-by-minute twittering and etc are too much. Everyone will gain now but the way I see it, these brands are hurting the industry in the long run. The future is unclear but I definitely see a revolutionary for the industry, good or bad I wouldn’t know.

Dinie.