How to be at New York Fashion Week – no plane tickets required, just a phone

Despite my complete lack of style, I’m actually a little bit obsessed with certain fashion events that are primary reserved for the stylistas and glitterati. Red Carpets before major music and movie awards are a favourite of mine, as too is New York Fashion Week. I’m a little bit obsessed, come this time of year, with reading the fashion rags and taking a look at the styles that walked down the runway.

I’m still madly in love with the Black Panther: Welcome to Wakanda charity presentation that occurred. Ten designers contributed pieces inspired by the movie, while most were inspiration pieces, some will be made available in stores:

I also thought Christian Siriano’s showing was impressive. Mainly because he chose to use models of all shapes, sizes and skin tones – highlighting an extremely inclusive and diverse range of fashion. Siriano’s name might be familiar because he was a previous contestant on Project Runway (which, if you haven’t heard, is coming to South Africa soon. Will be interested to see how they pull that one off).

The final thing that I really loved at New York Fashion Week this year was the Badgley Mischka Runway app. SAP helped develop the app alongside Apple and using their SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. Let’s drop the tech talk for a minute and explain: SAP is one of the leaders in enterprise application software. You’ve likely seen their logo somewhere at some point. Basically when it comes to enterprise and industrial software they’re a big deal.

So what were they doing at Fashion Week?

In short: innovation. The fashion industry leads the pack when it comes to technical and industrial innovation. Seriously. They tend to be the early adopters of new tech and find ways to align it with their own designs. In this case, working with Badgley Mischka was all about finding ways to connect the iconic fashion brand directly with their consumers and allow consumers to interact with a runway show they’d likely not be able to access.

For someone like me New York Fashion Week is a bucket list dream that ain’t never going to happen. But the Badgley Mischka app allowed me to watch the entire runway show live. Once the show was over I was able to go look at each design in the collection and feedback using the “like” and “love” functions. There was also a list of details on each look of the Fall 2018 collection including model names and the like. It really was such a great way to connect with the show in real time.

The app is only available for iOS users but is still running and you can go fashion hunting to your heart’s content. I really love what Badgley Mischka did with SAP and hopefully we get to see more of these apps and innovations at other fashion events!