Creating Fashion History

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ROLES:

CONCEPTUALISATION : FABRIC DESIGN : TECHNICAL RULES

SET DESIGN : OVERSEEING OLA & SOCIAL : CLIENT FACING

Verizon came to mcgarrybowen with the challenge to create something interesting for the backstage experience and livestream media buy it had purchased for the return of Fashion Rocks 2015.

I first joined the project in an emergency brainstorm. It was a little over a month before the show and one of the other key sponsors had just blocked an idea that was already in development. One of my concepts to allow fans via social to collaborate with artists/celebrities backstage, creating a piece of real-time fashion got bought.

The GCD on the project (Adam Khan) added the Midas touch by simplifying it to focus on just one of the elements I had planned; a piece of fabric made live via social. I took this and researched ways it could happen. Once awarding our tech partner Influxis we collaborated on figuring out the algorythm rules and how we could get a feed to an industrial fabric printer in real-time...and within a month!

The result was the first ever piece of dynamic fabric design to be created by social conversation and printed in real-time during a show. Using technology to make fashion history.

I designed the rules for how social became a design and I designed a suite of shapes and patterns that would be applied to the print based on trending topics. We Partnered with Christian Siriano, who chose the colour palette to fit his new collection.

The Print

In order to create a beautiful pattern size that fitted the width of the fabric we were printing to, we took the design (consisting of 22squares) and duplicated it, flipped it and then mirrored the two. The symmetry that was created helped make it feel more like a piece of fabric design, and helped the eye to see the visual shifts in conversation.

Online Experience

To prove this was real, we drove traffic to the feature page on the Verizon Wireless website, where an interactive graphic showed a breakdown row by row and some of the approved tweets that influenced the design (which were also searchable).

Vines

As well as Twitter Cards, tweets, Facebook and Instagram posts, we created two Vine videos.

Set Design

Unfortunately we were unable to have the fabric printing backstage, nor were we allowed to live-stream it onto screens backstage. So, instead, we used a series of screens to illustrate how the fabric design was being created in real-time so the hosts could refer to it during the live-stream and encourage the audience to become part of fashion history.

The Launch Party Unveiling Christian Siriano's Creation

This is the first time I've been able to sell in the full package of an idea. It was an ambition to get partnership with a fashion designer and then auction the collection off to charity and thankfully Verizon loved the idea so much, they made it happen.

Once Christian had finished his small collection using the actual fabric from the show, Verizon hosted a PR launch party to unveil the garments and announce their submission to an auction on CharityBuzz with the proceeds going to Dress For Success. A dream ending to a dream project.