The Runway

Often the runway appears to take centre stage in the fashion industry, spanning multiple dimensions—creative, commercial, cultural, and communicative. This post explores how the runway has evolved with the industry, the disruptive influence of pioneering designers and looks to the future at the possibilities of emerging technologies. Crucially, it will focus the theme of accessibility, looking at the changing nature of who can attend fashion shows and how this experience is evolving.

In the fashion world, people often talk about ‘moments’, and the runway is traditionally the stage on which these turning points occur. With a long-standing history and a number of stylistic developments, the catwalk is ever-evolving. In Contemporary Contexts of the Fashion Show, designer and academic Gill Stark explores the various purposes of the runway including its role in highlighting political and environmental issues.

On the runway garment designs are not seen in isolation, we see a performance that communicates the designer’s philosophy. Perhaps the designers who are most well-known for pushing the boundaries and pioneering the idea of ‘fashion show as spectacle’ are Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. In Catwalk as performance Space: Alexander McQueen, Rosie Findlay looks at how McQueen’s collections are so entangled with their runway performances that frequently when people speak of his work, they speak of the shows that unveiled them. Other designers such as Martin Margiela broke from convention through the location of his fashion shows. Margiela’s Spring/Summer 1990 show took place at an abandoned playground at the 20th arrondissement of Paris, going beyond mere to celebrate community participation, and everyday life. This, and other influential shows like it can be accessed exclusively on Bloomsbury Fashion Video Archive.

Margiela’s iconic show was part of a shift in the audience participation aspect of the runway. Beginning as private in-house presentations, primarily for wealthy byers, by the ‘era of experimentation’ between the 1970s and 2000, the runway had been transformed and, as digital formats were embraced, shows are now accessible to most online. From Passivity to Agency by YeSeung Lee discusses the widening access to fashion shows through the transition from print to digital media, live-streaming, open-source platforms, and extended reality.

New technologies have consistently played a crucial role in the evolution of fashion shows. As digital tools continue to become more sophisticated with the emergence of extended reality, generative AIs, and spatial computing, the way the public interacts with fashion shows and each other will likely change. Bloomsbury Digital Fashion Masterclasses is a collection which brings together unique video masterclasses from industry innovators to explore all aspects of digital technology and fashion. The case Digital Fashion Week New York and Clare Tattersall: Digital Interaction with Fashion outlines Clare Tattersall’s innovative virtual event which aims to give a 360-degree view of the future of fashion, the metaverse and Web3, looking at its implications for democratizing and collaboration.

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