Amid the global gloom of COVID-19 pandemic, the Shanghai Fashion Week (SHFW) is engaging hundreds of thousands of viewers through live streaming. One of the world's top runways, SHFW opened on Tuesday as planned after its counterparts in Europe were hit by the COVID-19 outbreak. The organisers took the bold step of moving the fashion calendar online in cooperation with China's e-tailing juggernaut Alibaba Group's Taobao and Tmall – the biggest marketplace for live streaming business – making it world's first entirely live streamed digital fashion week.

Features autumn/winter collections

The mega show on from March 24 to 30, 2020 features over 100 fashion houses and designers, from home and abroad, displaying and selling their new autumn/winter collections on Tmall's various virtual shopping rooms. The event also features more than 150 brands, including Diane von Furstenberg and rising Chinese independent designers such as Shushu/Tong and Angel Chen. In the following week, a string of catwalk shows will be held through hundreds of live streams. These shows will employ cutting-edge technologies such as VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) to create professional and realistic catwalk atmosphere, ensuring that the viewers enjoy an intermediate experience.

Cloud to connect catwalks with e-commerce

Through its combination of avant-garde designs and advanced technologies, the cloud fashion week will brings together multiple facets of fashion business. It will be the world's first cloud fashion show to connect catwalks and e-commerce, offering unprecedented one-stop, all-around experience to designers and viewers, as well as buyers and sellers.

Initiatives to boost Chinese market

China e-commerce platform JD.com has announced a raft of initiatives and budgets to help boost marketing and promotion activities of brands in China. Similarly, JD.com announced ‘Spring Raindrop Plan’, which will allocate RMB 1.5 billion worth resources to brands that were heavily impacted by Covid-19. It would be offering flash sales, live streaming, coupons, PLUS membership and content marketing to support its merchants. Much like Alibaba, JD.com has also opened up an omnichannel service to help brick-and-mortar stores get online. Additionally, JD.com has collaborated with brands to release RMB1.5 billion worth of promotional coupons to consumers in China. This will help them increase demand and resume sales volumes at a quicker pace.