The Business of Fashion

Cartier and Sergio Rossi | The power of Internet video

Yesterday I met with James Killough, an innovative London-based film maker, who happens to have a film in pre-production that may end up being one of the first real films about the fashion industry -- or so everybody tells me.

More to the point, James also talked to me about the potentially powerful combination of the Internet, video and the luxury industry and cited an innovative video project directed by Olivier Dahan, the renowned French film-maker, who collaborated with Cartier on a series of 12 videos for its Love collection.

I took a gander at the videos today, and was impressed -- not only with Cartier's forward-thinking use of video to create a narrative behind one of its most important iconic lines, but also with the stories themselves, which were engaging and, sometimes even moving.

Angel Chang | High-tech meets high-fashion

I'm sure you've all had one of those moments when a friend or colleague picked up your phone by accident, because it looked the exactly the same as theirs. I know it's happened to me on more than one occasion. Today, Paul Taylor of the FT cleverly compared the uniform style and design of most mobile phones to the Ford Model T, when Henry Ford declared that “the customer can have any colour he wants, so long as it’s black”.

Just the other day, we dove into the marriage of fashion and technology for the first time, looking at the emergence of the fashion phone. But, the ideas, questions and suggestions have kept coming since then, begging the question: is now the right time not only for bringing a little fashion to technology, but also for bringing a little technology to fashion?

New York-based Angel Chang thinks so. She is one designer who is integrating new technologies into her designs.