How Fashion Is Influenced By Music And Technology
At first blush, the fashion industry may have little to do with anything other than designers routinely coming up with creative ideas about clothing trends. However, upon closer inspection, the fashion industry has a significant relationship with apparently unrelated industries like music and technology.
The relationship between fashion and music is easy to understand since it has been around a long time. Music icons, people who are out in the public eye a great deal, either on stage or at a celebrity event, want to look good. Consequently, they model a designer’s latest idea, which then creates a stylistic trend for the musician’s fan base.
The relationship between fashion and technology is a little more difficult to grasp right away. Here are four ways that they are working in close collaboration:
1. Stylish presentations.
A perfect example of the synergy between the two is when Bugatti, the luxury car manufacturer, and Giorgio Armani, the luxury fashion designer, teamed up with an advertising campaign that showed fashionable models posing near Bugatti vehicles. In other words, if you’re driving a breathtakingly beautiful car, you might as well wear clothes that make you look drop-dead gorgeous, too.
Another example where technology and fashion can merge is when it comes to technology conferences. Sure, you can wear jeans like Steve Jobs as you unveil a new device to the world on stage—or you could make a statement by how you dress. Suppose, for example, you’re giving a talk on the benefits of your latest software at a trade show event. By wearing a Hex Tie with your blue suit, you’d breathe a lot of life into that suit. Without it, it would just be another blue suit, but add a patterned black tie, say a Honeycomb, and suddenly you draw the attention of everyone in the room. Do you think it might help sales if people in the audience pay attention to you as you talk instead of checking email on their smartphone?
2. Technology can launch a brand.
If you’re a new designer, you need to raise funds to start your business. What better way to raise funds than to use a crowdsourcing platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo? While you may be familiar with “Dress Pant Yoga Pants,” do you know how it became so popular? The designers raised funds for it on Betabrand, which is a crowdfunding platform. Once the prototype was funded and developed, people wanted to buy it. Technology had not only raised the money to launch the concept, but it also created an unintentional advertising platform for the idea to become popular enough to create a high demand.
3. Social media can tell a story about a fashion style.
Social media is all about sharing, and people like to share their fashion ideas. Pinterest, for example, displays thousands of boards. These can be found under search terms like “fashion trends,” “fashion week,” “Street Styles,” “Ready to Wear,” and so on.
4. Globalization and Automation
Technology has also affected how the fashion industry produces clothes. No longer does a single large company take care of advertising, design, and distribution. Now every aspect of the fashion industry has become part and parcel of globalization. Besides facilitating a way for different elements of the fashion industry to work together, automated technologies are making it easier to produce fashionable clothing. It will soon be possible to print out a new dress through digital fabric printing as it takes to print out an ebook.
A Happy Symbiosis
Besides the use of fashion to draw attention to technology, the relationship doesn’t end there. While fashion may help to sell Bugatti cars or keep the crowd engaged when you’re making a sales presentation, technology is also helping sell fashion by making it easier to launch a brand, make it a conversation piece, and even revolutionize all the elements of the business side of fashion development.