Nicola Formichetti is probably one of the most pro-internet people I know in fashion. He was one of the first editors that I knew of to get his own blogspot blog, eschewing a cold portfolio site and instead, uploading all his shoots and unpublished extras straight away. Then he got stuck into Twitter and now he's recently launched his own Tumblr collaboration involving a lot of pandas, which is fine by me given that I imagine everyone's face to morph into a panda bear at some point or another.
It's therefore no surprise that as creative director of Mugler, he instigated live streaming the shows and now he goes one step further to live stream Mugler's atelier from today (starting at 1pm CET) up until the show. This is definitely an unprecedented development in live streaming/preview activities concerning shows. It reminds me when SHOWstudio used to livestream their offices and I'd haphazardly log on every now and again to see a fairly quiet office. Except there will be a lot of hub-a-hub going on - off the cuff interviews with Formichetti, interviews with bloggers that will be dropping by the studio throughout today and tomorrow as well as access to Nicola's assistant who will answer questions on Twitter via the hashtag #askprince (actually there are a shit ton of hashtags concerning the Mugler show - #Mugler #formichetti #MuglerLive as well as the handles @muglerlive @formichetti so TwitLonger may be a neccessity).
One could argue that opening up the atelier to this level of intrusion and access ruins the mystery but then again perhaps Mugler could be the shining beacon of an exception. I very much doubt any other brand would ever be as gung ho about this amount of public participation in the run up to the show which leaves Formichetti to get all up with Instagram, Pinterest or any other social media phenomenon as an early adoptor.
In any case, this will be an interesting fashion n' web experiment to witness and I'll be dropping by the Mugler atelier tonight around 7ish CET to check it all out. You'll see me on the stream below, grilling Formichetti about panda bears and of course the new Mugler collection…
See you there?
