New Avenues

A beautiful friend at Moda Communicator (go there for more online wonders) has gotten me all excited about online fashion communication and they way that the fashion world is now turning to the internet as a serious means of reaching fans, designers, academics, consumers and just about anyone who has some interest in the fashion world.  The internet has certainly exploded in terms of its significance in fashion, and with lucky (or seriously talented?) little 13-year olds such as Tavi popping up at fashion shows world wide, how can we possibly ignore the potential for web-based fashion promotion and communication.

Blogger and photographer Olivier Zahm at Purple Diary spoke to Dirk Standen of Style.com  in a series of interviews about the future of fashion and suggested that the internet is not a creative medium for fashion and that true creativity for fashion and fashion photography still lies in the papery realms of the magazine.  To some extent I agree with Zahm - there is absolutely a quality caught in the pages of fashion magazines that becomes lost when those images translate over to the internet.  But the internet has also given rise to new possibilities for fashion which cannot be explored simply through fashion photography.  I've posted previously on the potential of artistic collaborations which in that particular case was made possible through web-based media but the more I read, hear and see about the internet being the right or the wrong medium for fashion intrigues me all the more into the issue.
I have never been one to trawl the internet for scraps of fashion related finds.  I don't shop online, I don't jump into the new collections as soon as they're put up on Style.com and I've never found the computer screen the most inspiring place to find or express ideas.  I do however use the internet constantly.  I know how efficiently I can find images, information, videos or whatever I may need and I am quickly learning that the internet can be a very effective mode for recording and in turn communicating ideas, thoughts and inspiration.  For me, the fact simply is that whether we like it or not fashion will become more and more filtered to us via the internet so we might as well learn to roll with it.  A pretty exciting concept if you ask me.  Already we have seen some amazing exploration of fashion through the internet and undoubtedly this will become an increasingly exciting area to work within.
While fashion film is not the only avenue which has opened up through web based media - and one which certainly didn't begin through it - it has become a popular and engaging medium for designers and consumers alike.  The great thing about fashion film is that it toes the line between traditional advertising and traditional fashion photography, not committing itself to one or the other and become a rather exciting brand artwork in itself.  While this video is not the only example of fashion film out there I think that it achieves something unachievable by the pages of a magazine.  It functions to provide that missing link once the catwalk show is over and we're left to understand the collection through photographs and drawings.  It serves a purpose of prolonged communication, an idea that hasn't existed in this scope until recently and for this reason deserves to be fully explored.

Posted below is a fashion film by Joost Van Gorsel at Iconique for the Jan Taminiau Spring/Summer 2010 collection 'Duality' which provides far more meaning for the collection than is received through a line up of the catwalk looks.  While fashion photography can be incredible when worked through with the right stylist and the right ideas, fashion film is succinct and direct.  In this clip, the doubling, the spinning and the winding rise and fall of the music which everything is set to so simply and effectively conveys the off-centered nature and concept of the collection - an idea which is unlikely to have been communicated as such in any other format.

Enjoy!

Video at http://www.jantaminiau.com/