On day 2 at London Fashion Week, I chose to attend a fashion presentation by Edda and two fashion runway shows by Rocky Star and Rangeen. All of them were creative in their own aspect. However, by watching all of these designs I was wondering how can creativity be licensed in the fashion industry?
Creativity needs time to develop and individuals need to gain certain unique skills to become creative experts. In general, all these factors are essential for developing a creative outcome. Furthermore, in the fashion business, creativity and originality are not even enough, meaning if the idea is not useful or commercially viable such creative idea could not be adopted. With this in mind, one must have a variety of knowledge in different areas to ‘connect the dots’ and implement this knowledge into the creative outcome. This is especially important, as innovation and new creative ideas provide a competitive advantage to the fashion brands. Such creative process should not be seen only in the process of choosing material or manufacturing but also in a management area and business strategies.
Fashion industry operates on a global level and influences economic and cultural trends. Nevertheless, fashion is also powerful within the music and other creative entertainment sectors. Fashion influence so many areas in our daily lives and vice versa that for the majority of the time we even do not notice its impact.
The fashion industry has so much history and is huge therefore saying that someone owns it as a property is, I reck a bit misleading (apart from legal protections of brands name, logos and trademarks, a specific pattern associated with a brand, certain processes for its creative design or other licensing agreements). However, actual fashion designs or garments are not specifically owned by anyone. Fashion cycle is repeating and is influenced by the current state of society. In essence, a dress worn on the red carpet by ‘celebrity’ can occur few week later for sale in department stores. Legally this design belongs to the department store or to the designer that put it on the stores’ rack, but is idea really owned by that brand?
Fashion trends are changing each season and creativity is perceived as a collaborative cycle. “Ideas arise, evolve through collaboration, gain currency through exposure, mutate in new directions, and diffuse through imitation.” (here) Constant “borrowing” and improvement with other creative industries are essential for creativity, especially as discovered by many studies that single creators were less creative than when working in the team. Innovation is also known as conducting new ways of doing certain things or processes. For that reason the more people are taking part in the creative process the more certain individual is influenced by environment or other people thoughts, that could open new creative ways, the more is becoming harder to license creativity within the fashion business. All in all, the whole fashion industry is affected by the whole society putting it in a position to be hard to license. After all, creativity stands for approaching problems in new ways or combining existing ideas in new outcomes. How would you license creativity in fashion?
Edda presentation
(all pictures were taken by me)
Rocky Star runway show
(all pictures were taken by me)
Rangeen
(all pictures were taken by me)
Until next time…
