This page belongs to the production team and stylists of special events.
fashion & events. is it art?
It's been a never-ending debate.
Fashion, Styling, Events?
Are these forms of art??
Is something as temporary as creating a collection for a Pret-a-porter show or staging a fashion show for 10 minutes or a grand reveal of a car with 3d mapping, water projection and state-of-the-art laser show considered to be of something of value? Karl Lagerfeld, in one of his interviews, strongly disagrees. He believes not, which I beg to disagree.
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Art, as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is "something that is created with imagination and skill, and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings." What a beautiful description ain't it?
Do you think everything mentioned in the latter reflects the former? Do you think that idea in your head is not something worthy to be called art?
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Having been doing this professionally since I was 20 years old, I've seen massive developments, technology and the more current: Social Media. Now, staging an event is not as simple as before. We used to stage something in Manila and then stage the same again in HongKong, but now, we had to customise it to make the experience unique again. It means physical events have to be just that much more extraordinary. As you see the events on your gadgets, every brand, every designer, every thinking individual have to make sure each live show is absolutely worth the trip. Clips of fashion weeks, gigs, festivals are just all over the internet.
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Art aside, it's a very good mean of commerce, of course there is the topic of direct ROI versus brand equity. Line must be drawn and your equity should win over direct ROI, at least for me. Simple logic being is would you like to be a one-hit wonder or a superstar with longevity? You can't just simply compute a day's revenue over giving out cupcakes.
*850 Million USD is the yearly contribution of New York Fashion Week to the local economy, an amount twice as the economic impact of 2014 Super Bowl.
*311,781 trade operators - a third of which are locals and the rest are foreign. These are the figures of those who participated in 2014 Salone De Mobile in Milan.
The ephemerality of an event and the work, the art of letting it go, agree it's hard, to have been trying to perfect it for some time. The satisfaction from any Event Specialist or a Fashion Stylist is never the show, that you leave to your audience. The thought process, the creation, the dance, the nostalgia, that surge of energy, that hot passion and the experimentation, that is what makes you feel alive.
If it's not art, well how does one make one?
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