IHT Techno Luxury Conference - Day 1 Recap

Oh my, what a day. It started quite early with Suzy Menkes opening the conference at 9am noting that luxury is like a silent movie star at the arriving of the talking movie. Technology is the all-dominating topic these days, and since we do not want and can not slow down the innovative process, Suzy Menkes suggested looking at the positive sides. What was once a monologue is becoming a conversation, companies will have to embrace the customer's wishes and ideas in order to survive.
And in the end, look how good this is for the world's trees, she remarked before giving the microphone to the speakers.

Christopher Bailey, who, with his likeable and easy manner, inspired the whole room and plausibly stated his own love and interest in everything techie. Burberry's approach to the new media was recently marked with one of the (already) most successful projects of a fashion brand in the web, Art of the Trench. This innovative, yet accessible site is not about following the crowd, but sets a trend and expresses a unique method to response to the newly risen demands of the audience. It took Burberry about three years with constant budgeting to evolve as a truly techno-innovative brand, with using skype and livestreams for fittings and learning from the feedback on facebook and other channels.
Bailey is really open and optimistic when it comes to future developments of fashion - though he sees the challenge for fabrics and trim makers to keep up the pace of fast fashion, he embraces this process, pointing out the neccessity of balancing out and connecting the production of the brand and the needs of the customers.

Following was e-commerce big player net-a-porter.com's founder Natalie Massenet who's statement that "fashion bloggers are responsible of 5% of the revenue" reached Twitter-heights today. What she exactly said was that affiliate is responsible for 5%, which does not need to be used by bloggers alone. Still I am not sure - is this 5% a lot, satisfactory or even few?

After the presentation on the Prada Transformer, smart fabrics and a striking analysis of the current status of the luxury online by Uché Okonkwo the long awaited (at least by me) Jefferson Hack entered the stage to tell us something about the future of magazines. I do, honestly, not know by now how to summarize his information packed speech without consulting the sources he used and shared (send an email to technolux@dazedgroup.com to get them).
He quoted Charles Leadbeater, William Gibson, suggested looking to Japan's mooks and bookazines, emphasized the importance of sharing and collaborating, the not yet to be foreseen enhancement of new technologies like digital paper and smart surfaces, and closed with a future prospect on a new project: AnOther Magazine will come up with a new site combining personalisation and recommendations soon to be reachable at anothermag.com/love.

(For a report on Claudia Schiffer's views on technology I kindly refer you to Julia.)

And this is just for day one! Tomorrow follows Frida Giannini, creative director for Gucci on the direct engagement with the costumers through the web, as well as speeches on the social media in fashion and the answer to the question whether Berlin luxury is the future luxury.