Re-imagining how fashion will be presented in the age of Covid-19
How do you have a fashion show when the designers, models, design team and logistical crew are not in one place? This was the challenge facing the students at Lynn University’s College of Business and Management in the age of COVID-19.
The solution was to rethink what a fashion show is actually about. Thus, the students went behind the scenes, speaking to some of the hottest fashion designers today and gaining the designers’ insights on what makes fashion sustainable and purposeful for today’s consumers. This new concept has been named, "PHYGITAL", where physical space and digital technologies meet to create a new concept for the fashion show of the future. (New York Times, 2020).
By engaging directly with leading designers and using digital mapping, BEEM holograms, and new virtual presentations techniques, the students at Lynn University were able to bring to life the concepts, creativity and innovation that is behind the best of fashion and the new frontiers of the virtual fashion show of tomorrow: “Surreal.”
Smithsonian Craft Optimism, a curated contemporary craft show and online marketplace, opens Apr. 24 and runs through May 1, 2021. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, Craft Optimism celebrates creative ideas for responding to climate change. The show features a collection of carefully-selected handcrafted, or small-batch produced art — all made in America. Proceeds support grants to the Smithsonian for innovative education, outreach and research projects.
The organizers of Smithsonian Craft Optimism coordinated with the Lynn University College of Business and Management in Boca Raton, FL to connect students with artisans featured in the event so that they might explore the artists’ sustainable practices, promote the artists’ work, and celebrate the intersection of climate responsibility and fashion.
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Lilit Ghazaryan is a female artist entrepreneur who has been exposed to art and design since early childhood. At the age of six she designed her own scarf and jewelry. Lilit grew up in Armenia in a family of painters, architects, designers and filmmakers. Presently, Rockville, MD is her home. She holds a Master’s degree in international development and social and public policy from Georgetown University. . While traveling to India in search of a topic for her MA thesis, she met with Kashmiri women who sustained their livelihoods by hand-stitching shawls, scarves, pillowcases, wall-hangings, carpets, coin purses and bags made from pure goat beard and body fur. It was then that she decided to combine her long time passion and hobbies with her academic training and founded Saints Valley Company to empower women through their handicraft in developing countries.
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Esther Beraha AKA Ana Esther Soued, is a contemporary and abstract Jewelry Designer and Metalsmith artist who lives and works in Miami, Florida.
A native of Caracas, Venezuela, Esther has always been fascinated by nature, free forms have always been present in her art, abstraction is a constant in her pieces and its reflected in the geometrical shapes and clean lines of her sculptural work.
What does fashion lack? "Microcontrollers" according to Dutch based Hi-Tech Fashion Designer and Innovator Anouk Wipprecht. As she is working in the emerging field of "FashionTech"; a rare combination of fashion design combined with engineering, science and interaction/user experience design. Producing an impressive body of tech-enhanced designs bringing together fashion and technology in an unusual way: she creates technological couture; with systems around the body that tend towards artificial intelligence; projected as 'host' systems on the human body, her designs move, breathe, and react to the environment around them.
Strangely ahead of her time; Anouk combines the latest in science and technology to make fashion an experience that transcends mere appearances. Sensors embedded in the design monitor the space around the wearer, and body-sensors check in on stress levels as comfort or anxiety. Her Intel-Edison based 'Spider Dress' is an perfect example of this aesthetic, where sensors and moveable arms on the dress help to create an more defined boundary of personal space while employing a fiere style. "This robotic dress attacks when you come to close" she mentions. Facilitating and augmenting the interactions we have with ourselves and our surroundings in an bespoke manner. Other than handheld devices, Wipprecht researches how we can interface in new ways with the world around us through our wardrobe.
Partnering up with companies such as American multinational technology company INTEL, software producer Autodesk, internet giants Google and Microsoft, car brand AUDI, jewelry brand Swarovski, and leading 3D printing innovator materialize amongst others - she researches and develops how our future wardrobe would look as we continue to embed technology into what we wear.