How the internet influences what we wear

I’m always fascinated with how the internet is impacting other creative industries beyond music.

On Saturday I took my little sister to The Vogue Festival as a birthday present, and we watched 4 of London’s most exciting young designers (JW Anderson, Jonathan Saunders, Mary Katrantzou and Erdem Moralioglu) discuss how they have grown their businesses from the UK. 

As designers who grew with the web, there were a few really interesting insights on how the internet has affected their work:

1. Changing aesthetics: Shopping online for clothes typically involves scrolling through pages and pages of images. Mary Kantrantzou believes that this has lead to shoppers paying more attention to designs that stand out - in particular unusual colours or prints. She believes this has been a factor in the resurgence of print

2. Designing for more climates concurrently. Sites like Net-a-porter clothes allow smaller designers to sell to more markets, and so a designer has to hold more markets in their head when designing - thinking about how a dress will feel in Singapore summer or Brazilian winter.

3. While critics and artists have always been intertwined, the fashion blogosphere has sped up the pace at which a new designer is decontructed and analysed. Kantrantzou shared an interesting story about how very early on in her career she had been exploring various designs, when a fashion blogger wrote a piece which explained how they all fit into a theme from her first piece to her last. That helped to solidify her aesthetic, perhaps faster than would have happened in the past.