London Fashion Week kicked off on Friday. It is a big year for the city, fashion-wise, as the British Fashion Council, which runs the local fashion week among other fashion events and programs, celebrates its 40th birthday.
Since its inception in 1984, London Fashion Week has become known for providing a platform for emerging designers, including Alexander McQueen — though the late designer’s namesake brand now shows in Paris. It’s also helped to bolster the careers of Simone Rocha and Edward Crutchley, among others. This season, the event will mark the return of Preen by design duo Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi after a two-year hiatus. It will also welcome back the week’s mainstays like Burberry and Richard Quinn.
After working with emerging designers for 40 years, the British Fashion Council is now showing support for digital fashion designers as the next frontier of innovative design.
The new phygital guard at LFW
On Friday, Syky — the digital fashion collective run by Alice Delahunt, formerly the chief digital officer at Ralph Lauren — is returning to London Fashion Week for its second season of hosting the “World Collide” event showcasing phygital design. This season, the event will host its first public sale of pieces from the featured digital designers, as well as phygital pieces from popular London Fashion Week designers. World Collide is on the official London Fashion Week calendar.
The event will introduce the phygital creations of two ready-to-wear designers: Hong Kong designer Kay Kwok, who helms the fashion brand KWK by Kay Kwok, and Taskin Goec of Maison Taskin, who hails from Berlin and is part of the Syky Collective of in-house designers.
The BFC opened up its NewGen program to Syky’s 10 digital fashion designers in July 2023, giving them access to mentorships, management tools and educational opportunities. The program provides grants and mentorships to emerging designers, which includes $2.5 million in funding from the U.K.’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, as well as free legal advice from law firm DLA Piper.
“To have our collective be a part of the BFC Newgen program that McQueen, Stella McCartney and so many other iconic British designers went through is a big step forward,” said Alice Delahunt, founder of Syky. “The fact that the BFC believes in them and wants to mentor them and show them at London Fashion Week just reiterates that London has been and always will be a place that supports nurtures and embraces emerging talent.”
Kwok, who worked at McQueen before launching his own brand, has shown a physical fashion collection on the London Fashion Week schedule for 10 years. Friday marks the first time he is showing physical and digital renditions of his designs — he’ll show three total looks, in both formats. They’ll include the custom 3D printed outfit he created for Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour, the look he made for Björk’s music tour, and the look he designed for Karol G’s feature in the September 2023 issue of Rolling Stone.
“They are pieces that have already cut through in culture and which will go on an immediate private sale,” said Delahunt. “Kwok is no stranger to digital fashion, and it’s really important to customers that we enable the phygital option to designers, allowing them the freedom to play in these spaces.” All of the pieces will be available as both digital files and AR wearables, and will be available shoppable using USD or crypto.
After the private sale on Friday, pieces will be available to the public on March 1. The private sale is exclusively open to Syky members and select digital fashion collectors. The limited-edition phygital items will be available only through the private sale, while the digital pieces — of which there are multiples — will be available to the public.
Kwok, whose traditional runway show was scheduled for Sunday, had a last-minute cancelation and is now only showing at LFW only through the phygital showcase. He declined to elaborate on the circumstances. The outfits from KWK are curated by Syky’s artistic director, Nicola Formichetti, who previously designed outfits for Lady Gaga and has worked as creative director at Diesel and Claire’s. Formichetti joined Syky as its creative director in January.
For his part, Goec — who worked as a designer at Chanel Haute Couture before setting up his physical fashion brand, Maison Taskin, eight years ago — will introduce an eight-piece collection entitled “The Last Dance.” The collection explores the intersection between the real and the virtual, according to the designer.
Goec used a custom AI model that is trained on his previous work to replicate his signature pleating and ruching for this physical and digital collection. “AI is not a specific aesthetic; it’s a tool, and it makes the whole experience much richer,” said Taskin. “A lot of major brands already work with CGI and digital elements in their campaigns, so this is just the next step. During the process, I exchange ideas and get visual feedback, and then I sketch over that feedback and feed it back to the AI. So it almost becomes like working with a team and directing them.”
Alongside seven digital pieces, Goec will present a physical baseball cap that holds flowers in its rim. The designer has previously exhibited some of his physical pieces at LFW but wanted to go beyond the physical designs.
Syky’s phygital sale comes at a time when many emerging designers are struggling to survive in the fashion industry due to financial restraints. Designers like Hillary Taymour from Collina Strada in New York have spoken about high the costs of running a brand, and the situation is similar in London. Designers including Taskin say that digital fashion allows them more flexibility and better profitability. On platforms like Roblox, where designers like Paolina Russo are starting to launch digital collections, designers can make up to $90,000 a month.
According to Taskin, fashion audiences are changing, and digital allows for more flexibility that can allow emerging designers to be profitable earlier on as it’s easier to produce and sell digital pieces. “There are different followings in fashion now,” he said. “There’s a big following that is physical only and that is waiting for physical products. However, from a business perspective, digital allows the designer to create a lot of products that fit a lot of different bodies right away. There’s not a lot of technical or engineering solutions needed.”
Delahunt said the barriers to entry are lower in digital fashion, meaning that they don’t require designers to spend on expensive materials or production runs. “It costs money to create a physical collection, and you’re constrained by a lot of the physicals of the physical world,” she said. “Your go-to-market in itself can be costly for a designer that does not have backing from a grant or a fund.”
She highlighted that the tools for digital design, like design program Blender, are essentially free. “Designers can experiment in the space, publish their work, gain a following and get capital from selling digital goods that they can invest in producing physical goods,” said Delahunt.
