With both the Cannes film festival and Couture Paris Fashion Week wrapping up last week, it’s evident that fashion’s most iconic fashion events are back (and in-person) after a year of lockdown restrictions. However, the remnants of fashion’s shift to online during the pandemic still remains, leaving the future of fashion week still yet to be determined. 

The vast majority of fashion week’s since June, have been taking place entirely digitally across the world, from London to Teipei. Despite concerns, this hasn’t hindered innovation but instead fueled it. The biggest designers in the world rose to the task with creativity, with Balenciaga staging a “deepfake” Spring 2022 fashion show with digital clones instead of models, Moschino creating a doll-sized show, and Loewe creating a “show on the wall” last year.

Then there’s the rising world of digital fashion itself—which has taken off during the pandemic in conjunction with the art world’s newfound obsession with NFT’s. Last week, London-based fashion label Auroboros unveiled its first digital ready-to-wear collection during London Fashion Week in partnership with the Institute of Digital Fashion. The result was a futuristic tribute to nature, with the label taking inspiration from mythological plants, sci-fi films and personal narratives and creating a new cultural identity built for the metaverse as part of its plan to build a digital wardrobe for “all occasions''.

While Italian designer Giorgio Armani was recently quoted saying that “fashion cannot survive long in an exclusively virtual form,” the innovation showcased at fashion’s most recent virtual events and the potential digital fashion brings to the industry shouldn’t be underestimated. Especially considering that digital shows are considerably more inclusive than their physical counterparts.

Last year, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana, all hosten their shows as public videos on their websites, taking away fashion’s usual element of exclusivity and furthering a democracy in viewership. After a year of financial turmoil worldwide, this is arguably more important than ever. The September edition of Milan Fashion Week alone last year, which combined physical and digital shows, garnered 43 million views on streaming channels, proving there’s already an eager audience.

Then there’s the environmental positives. In-person events require trans-continental travel, with a report last year stating that the New York shows are the biggest carbon culprit when it comes to travel, buyers, and brands. According to the report, the travel undertaken by buyers and brands resulted in about 241,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year. Now, buyers are buying digitally for the first time from digital showrooms, allowing brands to streamline the process by sharing collections and schedule appointments entirely online using 3D product images and collection videos. Some of the most successful platforms include Dtail, Hatch, Ordre, BrandLab360 and Joor (which has over 12,500 brands on its roster and over 300,000 fashion retailers across 144 countries connect on the platform every day).

As we enter a new post-pandemic normal, the buzz around in-person events suggests that they’re not disappearing entirely anyway soon, nor should they necessarily have to. Armed with new digital processes, the near future of fashion week will likely sit somewhere in the middle of digital and physical, like the future of fashion itself. That reality is already bleeding into other areas of the industry, with Burberry’s latest Summer Monogram Campaign featuring Naomi Campbell “mixing digital and physical realities”. Now it’s just up to designers, buyers, and consumers alike to utilize the potential of digital innovation for a more sustainable, inclusive, and innovative fashion industry.