Decoded Fashion New York Summit: Day Two

Kate Spade's Mary Beech –

Don’t divide the budget into print/digital/video – think of them synchronistically .

Growing up in brick & mortar, digital isn’t natural so hire people for whom it does come naturally because you know it’s important & that’s where the customer is going.

Print – “direct mail is absolutely critical” – email, digital optimization

Marketing digitally: Deliver the best brand story telling, customer service, unique experience.

*Not interesting to hear about big brands who were big when social media came out on how bit they are on social media. It’s obvious for people who know the brand to go and like or become a follower. What about unknown brands who emerged through social media? (Fashion Tech week)

Kate spade's E-bay sponsored shoppable windows were a big hit. They also informed new retail locations, where the most successful shoppable windows had been.

E-bay partnerships were a theme in omni channel retail. Rebecca Minkoff's store was also developed in partnership with e-bay.

The science project- a startup partner who helped get the algorithm right for question & answer through to product suggestions through to sale. First and foremost goal is to be a customer centered organization. If the best solution is a digital solution, then they go tech. If the best solution is analog, they forgo the tech.

Recurring theme: “We want to be wherever, and whenever, our customer wants to buy.”

Shoppable hoarding…? Terrible term

We see the brand as an “Ecosystem of innovation” 

Kate Spade now has a director of Wearbles. As a brand they’re investing in the space. A suite of wearbles – not one size, one solution.

Startups to look out for:

Kairos (opportune time) watches – replace the band not the face. Does this solve the issue of sentimental value / timelessness of other watches?

“Make every moment an opportunity”

NORMAL. Says Liz @recode “3d printing isn’t about making products for everyone. It’s about making products for just one person.”

“Wearables are not just about quantification” Human to digital and back to human.

–Do not put the text before the human experience.

Invisibility : not even call is wearable tech. Call it clothing. Don’t brand it like it’s some bizarre thing. “If it’s called wearable tech then it’s not integrated seamlessly into our lives.”

–From the product design to the system that controls it

–Design for movement

–How to design for touch in the digital age?

–“Less is better” Deiter Rams

innovative

useful

aesthetic

understandable

unobtrusive

honest

long lasting

thorough

environmental

BUT ALSO

Discovery

Complexity

Humor

Wild West of Fashion & Tech

Q: “What does fashion have to do with technology?” and vice-versa

A: Almost always, technology has nothing to do with fashion. It’s just a tool. It’s part of the journey.  SC

A: Actually, they’re both a part of our lives every day. They are totally linked. LG

Lawrence Lenihan has a problem with the term FashionTech – also saying that wearbles are tech pretending to be fashionable.

Google: user first – their customer isn’t necessarily fashion.

They have just as much a right to play in the fashion space as fashion has a right to play in the tech space.

Simon Collins the accountant? No, so why do tech companies say that just because it can be worn on your wrist it’s an accessory. It’s fashion?

ENCOURAGE collaboration

FH: “The smarter technologists hire designers…It should start with the design first, and technology will be an enabler.”

LL: “Is fashion doing it’s job in looking to move forward.”

SC: “Fashion is constantly moving forward & using tons of tech, they just don’t promote it through boring products like all these tech nerds”

“We don’t need to focus just on product.” LG “Wearables is just answering one thing”

“Once tech allows us to do something we couldn’t do before, then it will start to be interesting for fashion designers. We embrace tech when tech becomes interesting enough to embrace” SC

My take: fashion brands are reactionary, not innovators & leaders.

“what are the bigger bets we’re going to make? And then go for it” FH

LL: we’re seeing a golden age of transition across these

One of the biggest places is in infrastructure  –

Do existing companies get phased out? Then totally replaced by this new generation of innovative infrastructure brands?

“under-leveraged asset : billions of photos on social media.” FH

“If we could please use technology to make fashion a little more responsible– work on that” SC's call to action.

Still no one has figured out the mobile web. LG Forget about the bigger screens, focus on the mobile web.

“You have to be where the customer is” “there’s no greater antithesis to luxury than not giving the customer what she wants when she wants it.” LG

Two biggest issues: “what to I wear today?” and fit

Better than a fit algorithm is having an effective return policy. SC

LL – completely disagrees because the reverse logistics issues is hugely complex and expensive

The opposite of fit is customization.

“But given the options available to us now, yes I understand you have to optimize the reverse logistics.” LL

predictions for 5 years:

SC “no more ugly, please"

Virtual reality – practical applications FH

LL – the epic demise of all large retailers  - the next 5-10-20 years is about startup brands who can create something unique, hold up that dialogue and scale that dialogue.

“If I could be anywhere I’d be a great product producer.” Lawrence Lenihan

Wicker:

"How do you protect yourself from a bear? You just have to run faster than your friend." On hw to manage your online presence and privacy

Provide misinformation.

Protect your brand- read the ownership policies of the companies / content platforms / who owns the content? Who owns the customers?

Eventually you can own your own audience so that the data isn’t sold and shared with competitors

1,000,000 hacker budget

STYLUS

Pop-up retail

Consumer lifestyle, product, engagement

8.4% luxury pop up retail increase by next year (8 billion $/yr industry)

71% of consumers want brands to treat/activate their imagination

STORY (making things)– a reatail store that reinvents itself over an again.

Ephemeral retail- product as content

Pop up store solves a lot of issues – maybe it’s the future for small brands unless you have the overhead to invest in a store as technologically infused as the Rebecca minkoff, for example. Retrofitting later on might not feel as ‘invisible’

Think about the end goal of the brand or that time period.

Does this pop-up event create an experience worthy of instagram/twitter?

Pop up allows a mega corporation to break away from the logistical limitations of doing something in-house.  Gives you confidence to go faster in expanding and distributing a brand or reaching a new audience.

The challenge for mainstream retailer is to continue to find ways to connect the consumer to the brand. WAS brand first, product second. NOW item to item – no brand loyalty, but platform loyalty.

“The way we use the physical space will continue to evolve” MG

Ryan Mathers – writer who coined the term “the instavidual,” meaning we are all different people many times during the day. You can’t any longer target a massive broad demographic. You have to think about the evolution of the individual throughout the day.” JB

Entrepreneurial Thinking / Digital Retail

How do you enhance the buyer’s strategy(knowledge) before going into a buying season?

Boring

Retailers say they are doing all of their data mining for the benefit of the customer, but it’s really out of self-interest. It’s a business at the end of the day. It would be nice if this was spoken honestly.

IE saks stragegy to have exclusives online and different exclusives offline, so they have a reason to go to both. That’s clearly not done for the customer.

Important to have this space where colleagues can discuss how uncomfortable this transition into technology is. Fashion is old fashioned & nostalgic & doesn’t want to let go for sentimental reasons.

What about small brands that don’t have the resources to access this predictive power via big data?

Are designers more free if they don’t have to focus on data?

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The only way to absorb all of this information in a thoughtful article is to choose one topic and forget about the rest of it. I think these little soundbites might be a better way, as an experiment, for those of you who were not there to make your own analysis. 

I have strong opinions on most of these issues, which might have biased the things I chose to note down, but I believe these are the richest parts of the content of the day. 

Please leave your comments below if you have any thoughts on this format versus an opinion piece. 

Decoded Fashion New York Summit: day one

Please excuse the slap-dash format of this post. These are the highlights from my notes on Day One of the Decoded Fashion New York Summit.

Brick and mortar retail:

“They need to change everything about everything they do.” – Dick Lockard The Big Space

“Nimble, innovative” takeaway words from Dick Lockard "Agility:" takeaway word from Glen Schanen, Macy's

“We want to be wherever the consumer is” whether it’s a department store, a mom & pop shop, or online. – Andrew Fletcher VF Sportswear

Renting allows RTR to introduce people to new brands & transition a potential designer customer out of fast fashion into better shopping habits. 

Zara and H&M are essentially rentals. You know it’s going to last 2-3 wears and then fall apart. “Rent the things you’ll  only wear one-three times. Then take the money you save and invest in better shoes, a better purse, etc.”

On their new Brick & Mortar location:

Now that there is a store – if you ever have a problem, we can solve it within an hour. Also, there is an “element of security going into a physical store that will never be achieved online” JH

Online (thanks to data)  you can service the customer in more ways than brick and mortar. More about personalization.

45 min with a stylist and you’re outfitted for the entire season (social calendar is integrated in personal info)

On their new "Unlimited" subscription service:

“What woman doesn’t have a dream of a constantly rotating closet? What if there was a trap door in the back of your closet that took you into the rent the runway warehouse.” Hyman's dream for the "unlimited" subscription service.

What is RTR Unlimited? Very similar to Netflix à la 1998, you pay a monthly fee & then are sent 3 things from your queue at a time.

On the trajectory of the company:

The mission has evolved from delivering “Cinderella Moments” because that idea really relates to a guy. The 5 million customers have shown that they are dressing up for so many other reasons than just occasions involving men. That they are cooler, more diverse than they originally anticipated.

Will RTR segue into menswear, too? Probably not. Sticking to their value proposition: Self confidence, fun with fashion,  - doesn’t resonate as much with men, so the service will continue to focus on women for now.

Keep every year and every chapter in the story of the business full of new entrepreneurial experiences.

First we were disrupting others and now we’re constantly disrupting ourselves, internally.

Average woman dresses up for 28 special occasions per year. (dates included) – 5 yrs later, 34 occasions per year (because rent the runway is a cheap & easy solution to dressing up. So the mentality has shifted.) increasing the size of the designer market. Be smart about the way we consume.

On speaking to VCs:

Make it clear how massive of a market potential there is, if the immediate reflex which is to relate the concept to their wives, does not hit home.

Symphony Commerce gave a presentation on their approach to re-fashioning fashion business infrastructure.

Notes from that presentation: 

How tech can help / or not / scale a business

100 times cheaper to build a tech company now from 10 years ago

how to bring the same scale & efficiency to fashion & retail?

Internet= cost, intelligence, reach

Disintermediation (Everlane), intelligence (stitch fix), infrastructure (Yoox)

“Take the same sophistication of infrastructure of an Amazon and apply it to emerging and fast growing brands” & 

“How do you bring yoox.com infrastructure to an emerging brand?”

It might be easy to START a brand today, but it’s much more competitive to SCALE a brand.

How much time (forget money for a second) is spend on order related issues? Logistics issues. (right now growing startups are spending 50% + of their time on these issues)

It’s a business operations issue – one client scaled from 4-40 million over 18 months with the same employee count. Just better organized. Usually adding employees every million you grow, but there are more efficient ways to grow.

Iteration on store front. “It’s not a one time build”

Their insourcing vs outsourcing timeline: 

1-2-5 million your in-sourcing because you’re non-stop iterating (nimble & agile in your business) then around 5-50 million you can outsource much more (definitely fulfillment and maybe store front) so the team can focus on making a better product. Then upwards of 50 you have enough scale to bring it back in. You’re in a new phase of iterative process. Investing in R&D.

Understanding the inventory velocity across channels – online and offline inventory fulfillment is handled separately. Marry the relationship of online and offline fulfillment of inventory

Omni channel retailing REQUIRES omni channel fulfillment. (Requirements of wholesale shipments that have heavy charge backs for miss-packaged orders)

How do yo go back from outsource to insource? Fashion Digital in LA – Clarins is an example: They left marketing outsourced but they brought the operational side back in-house.

Customer service is one factor that should always be in-sourced for certain types of brands.

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Rebecca and Uri Minkoff talked about their new retail location which is the most advanced tech-oriented Brick and Mortar store this shopper has ever heard of. 

The editors' response after the preview: "You gave me something I didn't know I wanted but now I know I need."

Others said that it preemptively ruined every other store shopping experience. Or that it is like a new kind of therapy.

They highlighted these considerations for the foundation of their design and interactive components:

The moment of entry

Discovery

The approach

The fitting room

Lighting

The checkout

Their goal, as they stated, is to constantly be pushing the boundaries of how technology can serve their business. Their version of the customer experience seems to be actually customer oriented and not data oriented. They have considered the human aspect of everything they do, which makes the technology feel natural and intuitive. 

I have lots of love for the values of this company, granted all I know of it is how active Uri and Rebecca are in their transparency about the brand and their communication for the benefit of their business but also those with whom they share.

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Smart Manufacturing Panel:

Why have fashion brands been slow to adopt technology?

Because: technology is inaccessible & expensive- Francis Bitonti

Specialized manufacturers are necessary for a lot of these technologies  (integrated tech in textiles, etc) Manufacturers must become very hybrid.

“We have to create tools that enable the hybrid experience from both sides” AP

Software that is enabling & engaging for designers – pattern makers understanding the translation of 3d-2d back to 3d.  They aren’t yet trained to think from 3d to 3d.

“There is a 3D printing aesthetic that is coming from the materials and capabilities that are available to us” but bringing artisanship into the 21st century can result in a product where people say “How did you achieve that form?”

“3D printing has the potential to be sustainable but right now isn’t” Amanda Parkes

Would love to create a line of garments that literally disintegrates after 3 months.

“Either it’s meant to stay, or it’s not meant to stay” Let’s not make more clothes that are destined for the landfill. AR

We need to look outside of the fashion industry for the innovation that will inform our future choices.  (tomato farmers in California using biodegradable mulch, for example)

“It’s very important to us not to see the technology” SS

Then the tech is completely seamless – this will make it easier for brands to connect it to the consumer.

“I want my garment to be my computer. We need to relearn the human-computer interaction to evolve this idea.”

“The further we go, the more biology + tech will go into these products. We are actually at the height of exposure now” AR responding to a question on heath concerns in wearables & smart textiles.

You can’t think about the limitations you have to look at the solutions and define your business around that process. – FB

Tesla, for example, they realized they have to make batteries. It’s not enough to make a solar car.

One last thought that came up on both days is about the division between fashion and technology: many people were saying you have to choose which one you are, but isn't this a mixed message? Here we are at a conference promoting the mergence of fashion & technology, and all of these speakers are insisting that you can't be both. But of course we then demand everyone be both.

Simon Collins “You’re either a designer or a startup founder.”

When you take the tech out is the product still something the consumer will want? If no, then look into the licensing route – collaborate with designers.

“Be tech or be design – you need to choose one or the other.” 

The point is clear, and it's a valid one: collaborate, don't fake it. If you don't know design, find a designer. If you don't know technology, find an engineer. We might not have many who can do both right now but we do have a few and that number will grow. But in the meantime, cross-disciplinary cooperation is our best tool.

Fashion & Tech Week Paris

There's a new platform in town for disruption and discovery in the mergence of fashion & technology. Startup Weekend's Fashion & Tech vertical is encouraging entrepreneurs to see opportunity in the fashion industry through technology enabled solutions.

This is the last day of the New York Fashion & Tech Startup Weekend, leading into London then Milan and then Paris, following the major fashion weeks. Poznan will also host a startup weekend in preparation for the Global Fashion Battle that will take place during Poznan's Art & Fashion Forum on October 18. 

Starkweather has been involved in the conception of the Global Fashion Battle and organization of the Paris event as well as the round table on sustainability and technology in fashion on September 23. 

We'll keep you updated here on the details and discussions of the event. Sign up for the newsletter to make sure you don't miss anything!

Here's the program, that will be updated as it is finalized: 

Programme
(en cours de publication)
 

:: Conferences ::

# Le 22/09 @numa

:: Is the Technology Industry ready to embrace the Fashion World ? ::
Avec Amy Puliafito, VP Communication, Misfit ; June by Netatmo
Organisée par Eliane Fiolet, éditrice et cofondatrice d’Ubergizmo

 

# Le 23/09 @numa

:: The Future of Sustainability in Fashion ::
- Cécile Lochard, Citizen Luxury, HUMUS ; Jeanne Bloch, Artist, researcher, Sustainability Expert ; R3i Lab
Animée par Lee Anderson, Founder & Designer, Starkweathe

:: Parsons Paris (New School) ::
(en cours)

:: Meet-ups ::

# Le 24/09 @numa
:: Tomorrow creation, 5 start-ups rencontrent 5 créateurs de mode ::
Showroom + Meet-up + Table ronde
Céline Lippi, Fashion Technology Lab, Fashion Capital Partner ;  Stéphanie Tramicheck,Pinterest ; Alexandre Diar, I Am La Mode
Organisé par Hall Couture & - ICONITY -

:: Competition ::

# Le 26-28/09 @numa

:: Global Fashion & Tech battle : Paris ::
Edition parisienne d’un événement international organisé à NYC, Londres, Milan et Poznan

:: Talks ::
# Le 25/09 @numa
:: Cahier de tendance par Peclers Paris ::
:: Elisabeth de Senneville ::

...

Storytelling Through the Customer: Experience as a Business Model

Products carry a lot of baggage. We associate a lot of emotion with our things. Think about how hard it is to give up things that we loved in our youth or that belonged to past loves, how we choose one brand over another for a comparable product, and how fashion is such a powerful tool of individual communication.

We make choices with our clothes that tell a story about us. We make inadvertent assumptions about others based on the way they dress. These associations are universal enough that they’ve become a system of sartorial codes that we interpret when we interact with others.

How did this come to be? We can’t ignore the following facts: Brands have celebrity ambassadors, official and unofficial. Brands have price tags. Brands tell stories. Brands advertise. Consumers read magazines, emulate celebrities, go into debt for designer goods, often associate with people who dress much like themselves.

And so through our purchases we buy into the brand’s narrative, and project that story through our own personal narrative. Associating ourselves with the outdoor lifestyle of Patagonia or the edgy luxury of Balenciaga, the trend-loving-ever-changing wardrobe of Topshop or the budget conscious, design savvy Target.

As consumers, we empowered brands, over time, to play this role because we get something in return. It takes the guesswork out of decision-making, and gives us the power of the brand to tell our story. Through storytelling and advertising, a brand can speak to the consumer, but we know how that it is on the street through people wearing the products that the brand finds its voice.

As brands, in order to develop these narratives we curate and design experiences: The experience when discovering a brand or a product, then during the purchase whether on or offline, and then with the product in the world.

Brands are learning new ways all the time to create novel opportunities of experience for their customers. Today this exists as a constant back and forth between the brand and the consumer. And, much like I discussed in the article on apps accelerating consumerism, these methods can work for the consumer or against the consumer depending on your perspective. Here’s a list of some ways it’s going down:

1. It means letting the consumer participate more and more in generating brand content.

Increasingly, brands are using consumer-generated content to tell their story. A company like olapic, which collects the instagram photos of products taken by customers for their brand partners. The brands then curate that content on their site, creating a celebrity moment for that customer, and also driving aspiration for their customer base with fresh new ideas of how to wear those Steve Madden shoes or that J-crew cardigan.

Street style has become it’s own commercial operation. The old story of bloggers becoming brand ambassadors was a lesson to brands that the street has a strong voice and a lesson to normal folks that they could reach the brands & even become part of their sales strategy & communication (advertising).

These are all commercial opportunities for brands that can then inform their product development based on the way the consumer is engaging with their current offering.

2. It means not always letting the product speak for itself, but providing information around the product that will add to its value.

This is a tool that eco-brands & companies like Everlane and Honest By are based off of. It is their prerogative to communicate as much as possible about every element of the brand the same way it the prerogative of Armani to communicate on the men and women wearing the label on the red carpet.

Where is the garment made? What is it made of? Where does the material come from? What does “Made in Italy” or “Made in France” really mean? How is the price determined? Were the celebrities paid to go to the show? Were they paid to wear the dress or the tuxedo to the Oscars?

The label inside a product used to be more than enough to tell us the value of a garment. But now, there are many more elements weighed into that decision. The product no longer speaks for itself. The product needs a story.

3. It means being everywhere the customer might look for you.

Having online and offline accessibility is becoming common practice. Online presence provides a platform for the storytelling side, and the physical world is where you back up your claims with tactile reinforcement, gaining trust & loyalty.

Warby Parker, Blank Label: these companies are largely based online, but offer brick & mortar locations for discovery & for that tactile and face-to-face interaction we sometimes crave.

Being online is also a portal for people who aren’t nearby to browse discover a brand, browse its products and inquire, read about your story and get to know the brand. Being on social media so they can hear your voice and converse with you.

A brand needs to be wherever the potential customer might stumble through their door.

4. It means good customer service, following up and follow through, listening to feedback and responding to questions.

The customer experience depends on the brand treating the indivudial as such. Personalization is a buzz word these days, and although sometimes misapplied I do believe it to be a key in the customer service process.

Brands need to listen to the consumer and make adjustments. Often now brands make themselves available to customers with customer service twitter feeds, 24 hour customer service, and live chats built into their websites.*

Companies hire people to go through their platform, place an order, experience the brand anonymously and then report back on their experience.

*Recent and frequent experience reminds me this is still a very American quality (the customer is always right, no?). Customer service in France, for example, has a long way to go.

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In many ways, it’s all advertising, all marketing, and so it’s nearly impossible to tell what part of a brand’s narrative is genuine and what has been bought. As the consumer becomes more educated and more empowered, the most important code of a brand experience becomes honesty and transparency.

Tangible versus aspirational.

As brands, we have the choice whether to pioneer transparency before the demand from consumers forces us to do so, or we can continue to sell a dream, for the same of an outdated idea of luxury, with no real tangible provenance. To me luxury is in the choice and empowerment of the consumer, not the vague aspiration of a dream. This is the route we choose at Starkweather. Building a foundation on transparency, it’s a narrative I’m proud to sell.

As a consumer, we have the choice to buy things because some marketing campaign told us to, or because we are informed and we know what we’re getting for the hard earned cash we’re dishing out. When I make a purchase, empowered by my knowledge of the product and where my money is going, that positive experience lives on with the product and I’ll become an unofficial ambassador for that brand. It becomes a story I’m proud to tell.

The App: A Consumerism Accelerator

When fashion is your business, it is easy to take for granted the ease of putting together an outfit and then where to find that missing piece you are looking for, or knowing what is appropriate for a given occasion, or what will compliment your figure. As this article from Forbes points out, it's not something that many women understand intuitively and thus it takes time to figure out, and we all know time is one thing we are short on. Then there's style envy: the item you see on the woman on the street and covet and have to have. But where can you find it?

All of these problems, which for brands are missed opportunities to make a sale, have spurred many apps and brand services to bridge that gap from mystery and coveting to identification and sale. It empowers the customer, but it also loosens up their purse strings. 

As fashion brands and marketers, we're all about streamlining the experience–removing as many barriers as possible so you don't lose the sale. Facilitate the purchase with as few clicks as possible in the checkout. Yes, this makes for a better, faster customer experience, but it also encourages impulse buying which is a habit of consumerism I wish more brands would actually try to discourage (Patagonia being one leader in Need based consumerism). 

As far as the technology of the apps though, the concept is pretty fascinating that a computer could recognize and organize 2D images, or enable brands to collect customer generated content. But as much as they serve the consumer or give them a feeling of connection to the brands they love, these apps are also consumerism accelerators. They are businesses with a goal of making money, so the goal is to get high conversion rates and high engagement. The more you spend, the better they do. It is their prerogative to get you to buy things. 

This list of apps will give you an idea of some of the most highly populated such as: ASAP54, Bib & tuck, Covet, and Pose (one that was, according to Mashable, about dressing for the weather, but is now a closet trading app).

Much like we discussed with the uprise of shoppable video, these apps tend to promote emulation and aspiration rather than individuality.

What about an app that provides greater information to the consumer? A CNET for fashion to compare and contrast products to make a thoughtful and informed decision about your purchase. An app that makes fashion feel less disposable. 

We have enough ways to make buying easier. Let's start to come up with ways to buy smarter.

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Side notes–

The way we're going: One day we will be able to see a killer pair of shoes on a woman who walks by while we're sitting having coffee downtown and think in our minds "I want that" and our brainwaves would communicate with our smart glasses through vibrations and a distribution center somewhere would get a signal prompting a drone to take off, item in tow, and deliver it in to your GPS tracked location.  

Will computers eventually develop taste? Preferences? That aren't programmed?

Now that a 'hack' is a meme, does it mean anything?

The word "hacking" still makes me think of computer geeks sitting in windowless rooms with junk food and soda all over the tables, moms calling down to see if they want any milk and cookies, and periodic breaks to play in virtual realities with strangers who go by names like DarkDante or ninja69.

Or some more famous gents who started out as computer hackers and then became legit life hackers

But if I put away the image that Hollywood put in my mind, I think about is as the business of getting into places you're not supposed to be or access to information you're not supposed to have. There is a sense of martyrdom in the term, a crusade for the greater good and the belief in open data and idealism. A damn the man kind of attitude that means disruption and chaos in a way that things could never go back to the way they were once that system had been hacked. 

So when hacking started to be applied to life in general, it had a double effect of a) making it feel less criminal but also less noble, and b) becoming a meme that devalues real innovation and disruption.

Case and point: When hiking in Crête last summer, I was inappropriately wearing really cheap flip flops (never intended to go further than the shower at the gym) which, of course, broke. Ingeniously I found some bobby pins in my bag, and created a lock to keep the toe hold from popping back through the sole making the things totally useless and leaving the soles of my feet naked against the sharp salt-bitten rock surface. I made it all the way back to the boat. Later I saw the flip-flop fix (different to mine but similar) on a list of 'the 50 (or so) best life-hacks'. Really? 

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In the fashion sphere, and more recently in the fashion/tech sphere, this word has been coming up all over the place meaning many different things. They're called Fashion hacks. But so far it seems they fall closer to the bobby-pin-flip-flop-save than the change-the-way-we-do-things-forever kind of visionary hack.

Let's take a look at what we have so far:

You have the mini-fashion-emergency hacks, such as these on WhoWhatWear. And the since 2010 defunct (but still in the top ten of my google results for 'fashion hack') Guardian DIY fashion hacks, all of which are, factually, terribly unfashionable. There is literally a suggestion to bedazzle your perfectly good black sweater. 

How to update your trench every spring instead of buying a new one. Not fashion.

You have fashion hackathons, like this Hearst Fashion Hack, which is a platform for pitching an app that has something to do with clothing or accessories. 

This runway show organized by the Paris branch of Freespace that was meant to hack fashion week. But what does that really mean? (After waiting for almost an hour for the show to start, this attendee left for another engagement- waiting an hour for a show to begin feels very much like fashion week un-hacked). We need to depart entirely from the existing model to call it a hack, and to make positive change.

Pour la première fois, [Freespace] a décidé de HACKER la fashion week ! Lundi 3 mars 2014 au Numa Le Fashion Hackathon de [Freespace] Paris, ou comment détourner la mode vers un monde plus humain et plus respectueux de l’environnement C’est un carrefour entre science, créativité, innovation, nouvelles pratiques et usages. Merci à tous les participants et partenaires! Julie coiffeuse, Yvonne Mua The Art Place, Vie de Penderie , Franck Zongo, Hall Couture rendez-vous, La Splendens Factory , Glass Camp , ESMOD PARIS Peers The Mesh Directory , Studio 32 avril, Stan Marsil Maxime Gaudet la fonderie, agence numérique d'Ile-de-France, OuiShare Djen Karim – à NUMA.

And you have Fashion/Tech conferences embedded with hackathons, such as Decoded Fashion, which so far has been the most successful at bringing together some leaders in the disruption of the fashion industry as we know it. 

This site, Hacking Couture, puts it well, although their high volume content waned off after 2006. Still, I like their definition of what they do:

If Fashion Codes are the DNA of a brand, then Hacking Couture is the process that allows people to deconstruct something that is mass-produced into something hand-made and self-expressed. The idea is not new – its’ what open source code revolution is all about.

Starting in the 1990s, open source code software allowed users to exchange ideas and dialogs through free documentation and distribution. Not only did this create an open dialog between programmers, but it helped decode the nature of software as people shared how they hacked.  This opened a new world of communications and inspired the core of Hacking Couture.

This is how they mathematically break down the code of a designer. Love this.

So if we're talking about reconfiguring, reprograming, breaking down, breaking in and redesigning fashion, then what are we really doing? In all of the reading and the conversations and my own efforts to approach things in some way other than what I knew, looking for the back door, there is still so much troubleshooting and so much unknown. We're computers running an algorithm without knowing what we're looking for.

There are some real disruptors out there. It's just that, unlike in the tech world, they don't identify themselves as such. So maybe we should just be wary of the self-ascribed hacker in fashion. That's not the only dissimilarity between computer hackers and fashion hackers. Prison time, for example. And we don't need to lean too heavily on the integration of technology to make change. Computers aren't the only tool for revolution although they do help us achieve it at a great scale.

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It is always tempting to wonder about what the future is going to look like and wish your way towards it without going through the experimentation that will get us there. But some group has to do the work, make the mistakes, and make the breakthroughs. It's more than changing the belt on your trench to feel like you have something new, it's getting away from the constant need for something new. 

Hacking is about turning industry upside down, and bringing transparency and empowering the people. Maybe no one needs to end up in prison to achieve true fashion hacker status, but let's not throw the term around nonetheless. Let's de-meme-ify it and give it back to those fashion hackers who really live up to the words origins and originators.

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On the blog here I'll be sharing short lists of those who make the ranks for real in fashion today. Make sure you check back for that. Or better yet, sign up for the Fashion Hacker Shortlist alerts below.