One of the biggest successes when we were designing Ada + Nik, and in fact the biggest portal for success for Ada Zanditon Couture is online, especially during the current climate which doesn’t allow for IRL shopping.
Each year, a new generation of fashion graduates enters the industry, and it can feel like a big and lonely place – more so considering the COVID-19 distancing guidelines. It’s hard to get noticed in the chaos of the world, even if you have an extraordinary portfolio and it’s possible you’re the next Alexander McQueen, Virgil Abloh or Vivienne Westwood. One of the ways you can give yourself an edge and stand out from the crowd is by building a digital platform that showcases your work in the best way possible.
Now, fashion is three-dimensional art, meant to be worn and moved in, and reducing that down to images on a website is hard. However, if you do it right, you can create a corner of the internet that functions as a virtual gallery for you and your ground-breaking portfolio.
Good Images
Visual representation of your brand is so important. Go through the photos taken at your graduate fashion show, shoot with friends and collaborators, team up with young creatives, look for partnerships on Instagram. NEO 10Y recently collaborated with young designers like Ted Lyd and Zhan Kai on editorials that were in numerous high profile magazines. Make sure the photos are gripping, exciting and feature diverse and inclusive talent. Do they give you a sense of movement, of weight, of texture? Do they make you want to reach out and touch them? Hiring a model, a location, and a good photographer might seem pricey, but it’s a small price to pay to showcase your art.
Video
Video and GIFs can really help bring to life the visualisation of a garment. A main portfolio page with a gripping video showcasing the material and your creative concept can really come alive, here’s a film we made a few years ago for Ada + Nik which premiered on Paper Magazine.
Make sure your video quality is crisp and your angles are clean, and then make sure it’s embedded properly into your site so there are no glitches for any visitor. This could help make a big statement and show off your headline pieces at their very best. Remember you can also shoot on 4K with an iPhone now, so if edited right, you can really create some amazing visuals with an iPhone only. Check out the video for Y below.
Hosting
Now to the less exciting part. With lots of great products, images, video and the right promotion, your site and brand can have the potential to grow pretty big pretty quickly. Whilst most people host websites through shared servers, it could be worth you finding a cheap windows vps option. Virtual private servers mean your website will be the only website hosted by an individual server, giving you lots more space and resources to build your website into a monumental gallery.
Design
As a fashion designer, your website will need to be just as beautiful as your garments. Now, your skill might be with a needle and thread rather than coding, so consider working with a web designer who will know exactly what they are doing. In terms of aesthetic, let the look of your website align with the design of your clothes – so sharp, minimalist fashion equals a sharp, minimalist website, whereas collections with a more vibrant, chaotic feel will need to be showcased within a complementing website design.
It’s always worth reading more about digital and fashion over on Fashion Mash too.
This is a contributed post, edited by Nik