Fashion icons and tech brands came together during Mercedes Benz Fashion Week not only to learn from each other but also to chose a winning app that promises to help solve the fashion industry’s problems. The event featured a panel of speakers including fashion designer Zac Posen, fashion model Coco Rocha, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, WIRED’s Editor in Chief Scott Dadich, among others.
Besides the diversity of gender and race, participants’ occupational backgrounds varied greatly, with engineers and designers coming from major brands, including Nicole Miller, ESPN, New York Times, and Conde Nast, as well as startups including Refinery 29, Spotify, Consignd, Plum Perfect, and Refashioner.
Fashion may be an unlikely subject for tech geeks, but the event drew a large number of participants, as well as the support of the CFDA (including the designer Zac Posen); Condé Nast; and new-media fixtures like Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Dirk Standen, editor-in-chief of Style.com, and Valentine Uhovski of Tumblr.
The hackathon winner announcement was just a small aspect of Thursday’s all day conference, which also featured panels and Q&A’s with fashion and tech insiders.
The glamour of New York Fashion Week may have moved on to London, but excitement still lingers in New York over the industry’s future. That excitement is owed in no small part to Decoded Fashion, a company dedicated to bringing emerging technologies into the fashion world.
In addition to attending approximately one million fashion shows, Leive has to fulfill her responsibilities as a TODAY show contributor, as a boss, as the host of panel on fashion week’s first ever hackathon, and as a wife and mother to two.
As New York fashion week drew to a close yesterday, the digital world descended upon Lincoln Center for the first-ever Decoded Fashion Forum to discuss innovation in fashion and technology. Featuring tech and fashion titans alike, the panel discussed the benefits and challenges of business in a digital age.
SWATCHit, founded by Ramzi Abdoch, Jagjeet Gill, Jackson Lin, Henrika Makilya and Paul Yun, is a b2b platform that connects global designers with emerging market artisans and overseas producers.
Those making the fashion sausage — the buyers, designers, planners, merchandizers, marketers — want actual tools, and they want to be involved in the development of them to ensure their effectiveness. Which explains why techies were invited in to participate in a hackathon related to Fashion Week. With zero hyperbole, the event was dubbed a world first.
“My content is from me. It’s not some PR firm that’s deciding to sell other things. It’s me and my voice and I think only I know it best.” – Coco Rocha
