What will happen to fashion after Coronavirus pandemic?

Fashion has been struggling for quite a while now and the Coronavirus pandemic has only marked a turning point for the industry, making us rethink of fashion as we know it.

HERE'S A LITTLE THROWBACK.

If you are born in Milan, you have no choice but to love fashion, it's a tradition and it is innate.

I remember growing up reading fashion magazines and - of course -Vogue Italia. I used to look at Franca Sozzani’s provoking work as if it was art, images that at the time I couldn't fully understand but which were able to make me think out of the box. As a kid fashion was my thing, I even owned every single “Io Donna” special edition, a seasonal lookbook of all runways from New York, London, Milan and Paris. 

When I was in high school, thanks to my determination to work in fashion, I was able to attend a few shows of Milan Fashion Week and by then I had no doubt: fashion was my destiny, or so I thought. At that time I read The Sartorialist everyday as if it was religion. Online platforms like Lookbook, streetstyle websites and fashion medias were just blooming.

When the first style bloggers made an appearance, I started writing my blog too, thinking it would be a way to start a career in fashion. A few months later my name started to get known in the Italian industry, my blog hit 200,000 views a month, it became my full time job and I would get invited to fashion shows all over the world so that I could write about them. Back then, fashion was still an exciting, mysterious world I was getting to know. 

THEN THE INTERNET REVOLUTION HAPPENED.

A couple of years later, with the launch of Instagram, personal style bloggers became fashion influencers. Online fashion websites started to lose traffic, internet users would now rather scroll down their feeds. That was pretty much the moment when fashion changed and became a very fast, noisy world where to live in.

Luxury brands started producing at a faster pace to please a market where fast fashion brands were setting the rules, collections in stores were replaced every three weeks and some fashion houses developed the concept of ready-to-buy (garments were available in physical stores and online just after the runway shows). Fashion was no longer a work of art, it was a product of consumerism. 

CORONAVIRUS CHANGED THE RULES OF THE GAME AGAIN.

With Covid-19 many designers took the opportunity to express their concern about this system which is - in so many ways - no longer sustainable. Giorgio Armani was one of the first to stand for a slower fashion movement, as you can read in the open letter he sent to WWD. Giorgio states that since lockdown started he has been working with his team to now produce only seasonal collections (2 collections per year) and that his current collection will stay in stores until September. Armani hopes this crisis will be an opportunity to restore value to authenticity.

What will happen to fashion after Coronavirus? It is legit to think the fashion process will slow down to a more sustainable one. There will be less runway shows, less capsule collections and a substantial growth in online sales.

If Covid-19 is forcing us to build a different and more conscious world, will we be spectators of a renaissance of fashion?