Yeah, I've always wondered that myself. I've known a few chicks involved in the "fashion industry" in some way and haven't really ever gotten a full out straight answer. One, who was a friend from high school, told me that these types of shows are like concept cars - you're never going to see that shit, but some of the aspects will be carried over to actual wearable clothes. Her shows (very rich parents
), on the other hand, were just models in her designs that you could buy.
The concept seems ridiculous to me still. There is a purpose behind concept cars - they're basically an exercise in R&D and engineering. It sounds a bit the same, but without concept cars, it'd be very hard to strategically develop a lot of the little innovations that affect the automobile world. They're basically examples of objective based design. Need to solve a problem? Put it onto something else, solve it there (usually in an outlandish way), and then apply that solution to whatever you're actually building. Beyond that, they're there to gauge customer reaction at auto-shows as well as showpieces to the shareholders of where all that R&D money is going - tangible results look better than a patent printout.
Clothes though, they're an entirely different beast. There's no actual engineering involved - it's all aesthetic. Having a concept show really only has artistic merit, because it says very very little of the final product, and we have little to actually gauge what in this show represents that.
I don't know, her explanation could be off, but it still doesn't make sense to me. The fashion industry is a joke as far as I'm concerned. An example;
You know what the common denominator is between Von Dutch and Ed Hardy? That douche on the left.
