Poster of Shanghai Fashion Week Photo: Courtesy of Weibo

Shanghai Fashion Week announced Wednesday that it will be held in the form of live streaming from March 24 to 30, becoming the world's first fashion week to log into the cloud amid COVID-19. 

Under cooperation with China's giant online shopping platform Tmall, a total of 150 online releases including the brands Boy London, Beaster and Angel Chen will debut at the show. Consumers can enjoy the new design through the unique form of "cloud catwalk + cloud live broadcast + cloud shopping," according to a report by Chinese News site The Paper. 

Huang Ge, founder of the Shanghai Huangge Education Technology Company and an online education company focused on fashion illustration, told the Global Times on Thursday that she had high expectations for the first online streaming fashion show. She thought the digital fashion week's multi-camera shooting and the close-up vision can provide the audience with a better overall visual experience than the offline fashion week.

She added that the online fashion week will not only be available to certain groups among fashion bloggers, buyers, journalists and stylists. Everyone who is interested in fashion will have the opportunity to join in, which can improve the public's appreciation of fashion and trends. 

The new form of fashion week won support from many celebrities in fashion including Carlo Capasa, head of the National Chamber for Italian Fashion, Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council in the UK, and Steven Kolb, president and chief executive officer of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

The new cloud fashion week could lead the brands to explore new directions, help them to build their own fashion Intellectual Property (IP), promote the online and offline linkage of commercial brands and gave new designers more opportunities to face customers, The Paper reported.

"I think the cloud live broadcast method will definitely become a trend in the future even without the pandemic," Huang said. 

The deadly novel coronavirus led to the postponement of the Shanghai Fashion Week, and has caused many shows for luxury brands including Armani, Dior, Gucci, Hermès, Max Mara, Prada, Chanel and Versace to be cancelled or postponed, according to reports.