Exploring disrupting scenarios in the fashion retail and communication paradigms

Abstract

The growing complexity in the economic sphere, the accelerating rate of change, the new information technology and the globalization of cultural processes create a new landscape. The new tech habits are reshaping customer behaviours and businesses. Contaminations, hybridizations and negotiations increasingly characterize today’s retail landscape. The future of retail is connected to how well brands adapt and take advantage of digital change. Within this framework, the fashion system can catch the opportunity to reflect and redesign the entire production and cultural system. Today, the shopping experience is realized thanks to multiform sensory and informational solicitations and the different distribution and communication channels, both physical and digital, defining new needs, strategies, technologies and even new aesthetic forms. In this renewed context, retail becomes increasingly relevant both in its physical and digital form and above all in the ‘phygital’ one, between virtual and real. A form that creates new sales space through the creation of experiences and interactions between the physical space and the intangibility of the digital world: from the multichannel, we move towards increasingly integrated strategies that use omnichannel sales and communication methods. In this context, new paradigms and new retail concepts emerge, bridging communication and distribution. Communication actions that are increasingly transversal, enriched with new languages and tools capable of reverberating the aura of fashion through the creation of real cultural palimpsests such as the Dior Talks and Possible Conversations by Prada, the Alexander McQueen Floral Challenge or the Trivia by Salvatore Ferragamo. Projects between communication, art and marketing that redefine the fashion point of view on the relationship between real and digital; as well as the Sunnei Canvas project that uses 3D design tools both for the development of the collection and for the creation of animated avatars that will guide the final translation of the brand’s lexicon.