Lights. Camera. Music. Models. The walk. Cell phones buzzing. The hushed whispers on the front row. The nervous anticipation backstage. Dreams unfolding through seams of clothing. Loud applause. The bow. Oh, the spectacle of a fashion show! With the pandemic and its accompanying social distancing norms, however, the magic madness of putting together a physical fashion show or dressing up to attend one seems to be a distant memory, confined to throwback photographs, in just 10 months.

The show must, however, go on. If Covid-19 blipped and blacked out the ramp, lights came on in the virtual ramp of your phone or laptop. The big daddies of international fashion set the ball rolling. Giorgio Armani, Hermes, Gucci, Schiaparelli, Iris Van Herpen, Christian Dior, Giambattista Valli, Azzaro, Chanel, Maison Margiela, Guo Pei, Viktor & Rolf, Prada, Ralph & Russo, Ermenegildo Zegna… sent out innovative digital presentations. Milan Fashion Week, Helsinki Fashion Week, Haute Couture in Paris, London Fashion Week hit the reset button to kick-start the #NewNormal.

India’s very own Rahul Mishra showed his couture fall 2020/21 line Butterfly People through a 7.20-minute video on July 7 at Haute Couture online show, (with Federation De La Haute Couture Et De La Mode). “I was nervous about the communication because it was looking less fashion and more documentary type. This was the first time I was shooting my collection and making a film. Half the film was shot by me. I shot the making for a month. I started end of May, when the embroiderers came in, and I shot it every two-day three days in bits and pieces. So, the first part of the collection was shot by me and the fashion bits were shot by Hormis (Antony Tharakan),” the Delhi-based designer had told us after the show. And, he enjoyed the format. “I like the format because you are otherwise judging the outfit with an eight-10 second viewing on the runway. When you are looking at a fashion show, you are looking at the tip of an iceberg. You are only focussing on ‘what’ is there in front of you, which is 10 per cent. You forget about ‘how’... and ‘why’ it is being created. This time, it was full of heart,” said Rahul who has shown 11 seasons of Paris Fashion Week and two seasons of Haute Couture over these six years and became the first Indian designer to showcase at Haute Couture this January.

Pieces of You, Tarun Tahiliani’s digital showcase Sourced by the correspondent

Back home, the unmatchable Tarun Tahiliani put out India’s first full-length digital fashion show in July with Pieces of You — his autumn/winter 2020 collection. “I am a bit mad and usually have about 80 models but this one had just seven. All the parties involved strictly adhered to safety protocol with hair and make-up artists in hazmat suits, everyone in masks, social distancing in place and each model getting a room to themselves and a bag with all the paraphernalia. During the shoot, everyone was in masks behind the scenes and the few cluster-choreography sequences also had space between the models,” Tarun told us right after the show.

The movers and shakers of the fashion week kingdom in India — FDCI and Lakme Fashion Week (LFW), too, rolled out digital weeks. While FDCI hosted the first-ever digital edition of India Couture Week in September and followed it up with Lotus Make-Up India Fashion Week in October, LFW 2020 went digital with a season-fluid edition in October.

Prada’s spring/summer 2021 digital showcase Sourced by the correspondent

“With our backs to the wall, we had to be more innovative than normal times,” said Sunil Sethi, chairman, FDCI. Experience was his saviour. “We were only a few days away from the physical event when we decided to call it off,” he said. Which meant heavy financial losses, but, in hindsight, was “the right thing to do”. “At least in our industry we were the first ones to react and within a week, we refunded all the designers, which meant returning money to 100 designers, eight sponsors,” he said.

The long lull was, however, unexpected. “No one imagined that our lives will be on hold for almost a year and because we were optimistic even during March, we announced our India Couture Week in the month of July…. We were hoping to resurrect the physical fashion week again,” said Sethi.

Chanel’s Cruise 2021 Sourced by the correspondent

All that, however, started to look bleak, when visuals from the streets of Italy and then London and America poured in. That’s when the digital medium opened up, something Sethi considers to be the “biggest feather in the cap, with 54 shows”. “As time went by and people started to maintain physical distance, we were able to shoot the shows physically without any audience. Everybody was Covid tested. Fortunately, the FDCI office in Okhla Industrial Estate is large enough to do everything in-house. Most of the films were shot there. In the Couture Week, all the shows excepting one, were shot outside. When we succeeded in shooting one here and give an immersive experience, out of the 42 shows at Lotus Make-Up India Fashion Week, more than half the shows were shot here,” he said.

Hermes’s spring/summer 2021 digital showcase Sourced by the correspondent

LFW started planning for a digital version four months before the event happened. “Hence we were able to create a fair set of tech innovations,” said Jaspreet Chandok, head — lifestyle businesses, IMG Reliance. The important part “was to ensure the health and safety of our talent and crew”. “We instituted perhaps the most aggressive safety protocols for a shoot in the country with over 800 Covid tests done and a seven-day quarantine for each person before entering the bubble,” said Chandok.

Avant-garde designer Gaurav Gupta loved the new experience and even though he has made fashion films before, this allowed him to “capture the audience in a differently imaginative way”. GG showed his Name is Love at India Couture Week. “We were the opening show of the first digital fashion week of India, the Couture Week. People expected drama and fantasy but I wanted to take a different route. I literally wanted to talk about something very positive and could think of two words… love and hope… an inclusive celebratory campaign,” he said.

For Gaurav, the challenges were “we were not meeting regularly”. “Everything was being decided more and more on phone and Zoom calls. The logistics become double and it takes double the time to do something. I see an opportunity in those challenges because then more streamlined creative brains come together. It’s been more clarity of thought and communication,” he said. Though he missed his audience and being backstage, “adjusting the models” and “feeling nervous”, it was “a humbling experience” which made him realise that his audience is much larger in number and “feeling” than the real audience he meets.

Rahul Mishra’s couture fall 2020/21 line Butterfly People showcased Sourced by the correspondent

Rahul missed getting feedback right then and there. “The kind of energy and personality that a model brings to the clothes, the set-up and the craziness of backstage. It has its own beauty, vividness and craziness, emotional high,” he said.

For someone as “hands-on” as Sethi, this was the first time he was completely “at sea” because he is “a total amateur at technology”.

Both Chandok and Sethi felt a marriage of the physical and virtual will be the way forward. “We began our journey towards being a digital platform a few years ago, thus some of the actions were already in place when the pandemic hit. We were the first-ever fashion week in the world to live stream on OTT networks and also pioneered innovations in social media actions and virtual reality. Hence the creation of the Hub, Virtual Showroom & See Now Buy Now will expand themselves and become key actions in the years to come. Even when we return to a physical event, all these elements will become companion actions adding to the overall product offering to consumers,” said Chandok.

Sethi hoped to do a physical show in March though, but the doffed his hat at the reach the virtual platform has got FDCI.

“Many new things will be born. The virtual space was anyway becoming more and more important over the past five years with robotic influencers all over the world. This situation propelled it much more. There is charm of a physical show but even that show will be consumed by millions in a digital way,” signed off Gaurav.