Lessons
Intro to Produce a Fashion Show
01:12 2The Fashion Show: Why? When? How?
06:13 3Pre-Show: Develop a Fashion Show Concept
23:46 4Pre-Show: Build a Team
22:09 5Pre-Show: Create a Timeline and Checklist
22:45 6Day of Show: Backstage Strategy
14:06 7Show: Working with Front of House
18:43 8Show: Scheduling Run of Show
17:12Lesson Info
Post-Show: Increasing Your Audience
Increasing your audience, these were all the things we were talking about and this is why we're talking about it. So, like I said giving deadlines for content to the photographers and video. Post-show posts and this is also like I said earlier, you wanna think of it as a campaign. So think about how you wanna deliver stuff because if you slam everything out at the same time only the die hards are going to take it all in. Some people are just see the first thing and just feel like oh, that's way too much. I remember one time I was on holiday and I just I saved all my images for Instagram to finish at home. You know what I mean? I didn't do it in real time and someone was really overwhelmed. I overwhelmed everybody's feed because pictures just keep coming in, in 15 minutes there were 50 pictures. So you wanna be, I didn't even think of that, that I would be doing that to people so you wanna time out the delivery of images as well as posts. And then always remember that all of this you sh...
ould be archiving as best you can. Digital stuff, I always back up onto external hard drives, flash drives, burn on CD's, whatever it is. And if you get press clippings, sometimes you can turn an online article for a news website you can save it as a PDF, the whole thing and just save that, or you can find the physical version and you can scan it in. If they're writing about you and you know it, like they've talked to you sometimes they will even provide you with a beautiful clean PDF of the article in the paper. Not everybody does that but some of the bigger institutions do. So, you wanna think about how you're saving all this things. And don't forget that your clothes should also be part of your archives. If you don't have the resources to save the actual garments, just make sure you have a timeline and a history. It may not seem like a lot now but when you're all sort of at the height of your careers there's going to be opportunities to share that. And even, no matter where you are at your career these are things that you can pull out and say, I was thinking about this. You know and say, look at what I've done and it's almost that idea of me taking pictures at an event not knowing quite what's gonna come of, how I'm gonna put them together. Same thing with press and stories and archiving your images. I'm just curious, you mentioned a while ago that a lot of the haute couture dresses are really not meant for sale or people are not really going to wear them. So what's done with them? Oh, a lot of them go into museums. Museums are now seriously collecting fashion. And it's not that they're not necessarily gonna be worn because I think it's just such a limited customer for it, the clientele is such a small group and chances are that person, if they wear it it's gonna be worn once and then either donated or stored or that kind of thing. So, those are entrance pieces often and I think museums are starting to get very active about collecting fashion. But it seems to me that some of them are as an example for film and for theater, a lot of times you have to over size your things. You have to emphasize shoulders or lengths or whatever. So it would look ridiculous if you were wearing that out in the street. In regular... So I wonder if that applies to some of the-- Yeah, because the sheer scale of some of the theatrical garments is definitely overwhelming and again, meant for the theater of fashion. But the other thing is they will influence the other lines. Like the lines that are ready to wear, let's say. They'll set the mood and then it'll be interpreted for a different price point and a different consumer who can again, buy into the fantasy, love the show and have something maybe with that print but more wearable. So any combination of that. There are also collectors who make, private collectors who, I have a friend who collects a lot of Chanel and has a very wonderful historic Chanel collection that she's been working on for years. And it's fairly new that fashion itself is being valued. Clothes were always collected but they were originally collected for the value of the textiles. And how important how it was in historical context, but now people are realizing the power and the value of fashion. I spoken to a couple of curators who say their big go to for finding fashion, historical fashion was vintage shops and eBay and things like that, and now it's almost impossible to find things that are that quality because people are really seeing the value of it. So cool, alright. So, a couple of questions. How do you keep your content providers on schedule? And this is vitally important like I mentioned earlier, but you wanna come up with a strategy for it. Is it a conversation? Is a phone call follow-up? It's an email, because you also don't wanna get annoying. But if you made the effort to talk about that first, then you kinda have the right to follow-up on it. So, but come up with that plan. And then, what are the stories you tell after a show to the public? And we talked about that. What are the best stories you tell after a show to the press? Because their interest is going to be different. So, what did we accomplish? What did we do? If it was a charity the story is your collection helped raise X amount of dollars or your collection brought attention to this underground, you know, whatever it is. Think about from a press story what's newsworthy 'cause not everything is. And then, what is the best way to store content? I spoke about digital but a great example is Norma Kamali. From the beginning of her career she saved, I believe, every sample she had made and she had them in these warehouses and she had an incredible strategy for afterwards. Like at a certain point she said, "I'm gonna empty these places out." There was, the items that she saved for posterity, she said, "No I'm just saving these samples "for historical reference." You know the important iconic Norma Kamali items. And then I believe there were items that she thought were still relevant today so she started reproducing those. And then there were garments that she I think, I don't know if she sold them or how it worked, but for stylists and for movies and things like that where they can be used in, you know to represent a certain period or certain style, so there was use for all of it but not all of it was the same. I mean, so for her it was very definitely unique. And although that seems really long term think about, if you're thinking about it as you go, she had some foresight because she could have, you know when she was starting it was small company and a lone designer, so she really saw the value of saving all her work. So you should do that even if you don't quite know yet what you're gonna do with it. And if you have the space. And if you don't, I would say documenting it and recycling that garment or that fabric or donating it, whatever you wanna do but make sure you've documented your work very well. Okay, yes. Can you maybe tell us about some of the stories that you've gotten pick up from the press on that you've shared about say, maybe the last one or two Boston Fashion Weeks? What do you mean? Like what stories? When you're talking about the what are the stories that you tell after a show to the press or what are some of the ones that have successfully for you? Well most recently our big initiative, our big push moving forward is kind of redefining what fashion means in Boston, and for us, it's been about all these collaborations with other industries. So the really exciting stories for us last year, for instance, we had a lot of great shows and parties and all the usual affairs for Fashion Week but there was one event that actually kicked off Fashion Week which was called Descience and it was this initiative that a team from MIT had put together to pair up scientists and designers and for, and I really saw the value of it in terms of, these designers were finding the inspiration from science and the research that these scientists were doing. But on the scientists' side all of a sudden they had a really unusual story telling tool to interpret their work for a whole new audience. And where sometimes research might seem dry and kind of like, I don't get it, these designers in a really creative way helped them express themselves in a new way. So the conversation that came out of that the pairings, the inspiration, the new vision, because it's uncharted territory was one of the big stories after Fashion Week and it led to us getting really excited and pushing that even further as we move forward.