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Interview
13 September 2020 2.00 h

Marta Coca

Director of 080 Barcelona Fashion

“We must promote Catalan fashion at this critical time for the industry”

The 26th edi­tion of 080 Barcelona Fash­ion, the plat­form that pro­motes Cata­lan fash­ion around the world and is or­gan­ised by the De­part­ment of Busi­ness and Knowl­edge’s Con­sor­tium of Com­merce, Crafts and Fash­ion (CCAM in Cata­lan), was sup­posed to have taken place at the end of June and early July. How­ever, due to the Covid-19 cri­sis, the event was moved to Sep­tem­ber, and this time it will be in dig­i­tal for­mat.

Will the show be en­tirely dig­i­tal?
Dig­i­tal yes, but not vir­tual. We’ll broad­cast 080 com­pletely dig­i­tally with­out the pos­si­bil­ity of phys­i­cal at­ten­dance at the event. There will be no pub­lic, no buy­ers, no jour­nal­ists, no friends of the brands,... But the cat­walk at the Recinte Mod­ernista de Sant Pau will be real, the mod­els will be real and they will pa­rade in the dif­fer­ent col­lec­tions of real clothes. This will be recorded and broad­cast on dig­i­tal con­tent plat­forms, as if it were a 080 tele­vi­sion chan­nel.
So the only peo­ple who will see the show in per­son will be cam­era op­er­a­tors.
Yes, they’ll be film­ing the pre­sen­ta­tions. The fact that there will be no pub­lic will allow us to op­er­ate more freely within the venue’s spaces, to record the event in dif­fer­ent ways, and to find new ways of bring­ing the col­lec­tions and brands closer to the spec­ta­tor.
In the fu­ture, once the Covid-19 cri­sis is over, will the 080 go back to its usual for­mat?
We hope that in com­ing edi­tions peo­ple will be able to at­tend to watch the pa­rades, as we are very com­mit­ted to the phys­i­cal for­mat, but I think that the whole issue of dig­i­tal broad­cast­ing has come to stay. What does dig­i­tal allow us to do? Let’s look for the pos­i­tives: it al­lows us to reach many new au­di­ences that are oth­er­wise very dif­fi­cult to reach. And when I say new au­di­ences, I mean peo­ple every­where, in the world of art and cul­ture, for ex­am­ple, who are in­ter­ested in the fash­ion in­dus­try.
What about a hy­brid model?
The hy­brid for­mula is an at­trac­tive pos­si­bil­ity for the fu­ture. But the whole Covid thing has hap­pened all of a sud­den and is still going on. We’ve had to re­think the new 080 in record time, and we’re still learn­ing. Once we’ve taken this on board and know more, it will be eas­ier to make the nec­es­sary im­prove­ments in the dig­i­tal area and at the same time rein­te­grate phys­i­cal at­ten­dance and face-to-face meet­ings be­tween peo­ple and pro­fes­sion­als in the sec­tor.
Covid-19 has hit the fash­ion world hard. The 080 show will be im­por­tant to re­vi­talise the sec­tor.
The ef­fort we’re all mak­ing to go ahead with 080 is pre­cisely be­cause in the face of the crit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion that the sec­tor is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing in Cat­alo­nia and around the world, plat­forms like ours must serve to make the brands we have vis­i­ble. We must make use of all the tools at our dis­posal to help make brands vis­i­ble and boost their mar­ket­ing and rep­u­ta­tion on an in­ter­na­tional scale.
What will we see at 080 in Sep­tem­ber?
We closed the ap­pli­ca­tion process on June 30, from which we’ve se­lected the brands that will take part. What will we see? The 080 plat­form has been let­ting each brand de­cide its own strat­egy for a few sea­sons, and in re­cent years 85% of de­sign­ers and brands have opted to pre­sent their spring-sum­mer col­lec­tions for the fol­low­ing year, so we will no doubt see what will be com­ing up for spring-sum­mer of 2021. At the same time, for a few sea­sons some brands have opted for the see-now-buy-now strat­egy. Since Covid-19, we’ve been see­ing a grow­ing com­mit­ment to this for­mula, so we will surely see many pro­pos­als for this au­tumn-win­ter of 2020.
Sus­tain­abil­ity and tech­nol­ogy ap­plied to fash­ion have been two main­stays of re­cent 080s. Is this still the case?
The 080 plat­form is very open to in­clud­ing among its tools busi­ness strate­gies that in­cor­po­rate dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies and, above all, those that are sus­tain­able. Yet, our goal is not to de­mand that a brand be 100% sus­tain­able or that it use tech­no­log­i­cal ma­te­ri­als. Our aim is to pro­mote Cata­lan fash­ion in the com­mer­cial field, the busi­ness of the fash­ion, the fash­ion in­dus­try. It’s true that the tech­nol­ogy ap­plied to smart fab­rics is of great in­ter­est to us and we have more and more brands work­ing on it, but the re­al­ity is that these fab­rics are not yet in stores. An­other thing is sus­tain­abil­ity; a few years ago it was a dif­fer­en­tial value, now we have to see it as a ne­ces­sity. If you’re not sus­tain­able, you have a prob­lem.

in­ter­view fash­ion

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