#MBFW Russia Recap Episode (Part 1 of 2)

Earlier this month, Electric Runway traveled to Moscow for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week to find out what’s happening in Russia in terms of fashion tech. Above is part one of our two-part podcast recap of the adventure.

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In this episode, you’ll meet Craig Arend, a digital influencer from New York and one of the fathers of street style photography.

Craig shares how he’s experimenting with new platforms for fashion, including virtual reality. For this season’s fashion week, he teamed up with YouVisit, a company that creates interactive virtual reality experiences for businesses. YouVisit is known for leveraging VR to enable people to enter places we’d normally have limited access to, like the Palace of Versailles. Now, the company is establishing itself in the fashion industry, using VR as a way to give audiences unprecedented access to fashion weeks.

You’ll also hear from Mike Turino, Director of Sales and Partnerships at YouVisit. Last year, Turino and Arend teamed up to produce Mirror to the Soul, an award-winning VR film exploring chief cornerstone experiences from MBFW Russia, including backstage hair and makeup, front row, the runway pit, street style, and more. You can watch Mirror to the Soul in 360 below.

For this season, Arend and Turino came together again, but this time with a focus on creating fashion rather than just consuming it. Using HTC’s Vive headset, fashion week attendees were invited to step inside a green screen to illustrate their own fashion using Google Tilt Brush, a tool that turns your surroundings into a canvas and lets you paint space with virtual reality. Videos of the illustrations coming to life were saved and made available for sharing out on social media channels.

To demonstrate the potential of this new technology, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Russia also invited a number of world-renowned illustrators such as JaeSuk Kim to create with Google Tilt Brush. Kim is most known for his illustrations of the Susu Girls, a family of long-legged, short-haired fashionistas. You can see some of his illustrations made with Google Tilt come to life below.

Part 2 of @jaesukkim’s Google Tilt Brush illustrations done inspired by designers at @mbfwrussia #mbfwrussia video shot by @kinopasha

A video posted by The Craigster (@altamiranyc) on Oct 17, 2016 at 8:11am PDT

So @mbfwrussia is having fashion illustrators draw in Virtual Reality using #GoogleTiltBrush. Their drawings are inspired from runway looks that presented at this seasons #mbfwrussia. Here Seoul based #fashion illustrator @jaesukkim shows us a view of his favorite look from the @sorryimnot show. The file format in this video can be used to create a 3d print model and used in future Augmented Reality activations. #fashionfuture

A video posted by The Craigster (@altamiranyc) on Oct 17, 2016 at 12:19am PDT

In this episode, you’ll also hear from Alexander Shumsky, the Executive President of the Russian Fashion Council and the President of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week on his vision of the fashion week of the future.

Stay tuned to iTunes, the Electric Runway podcast is taking you inside #MBFWRussia to find out what’s happening in terms of #FashionTech. You’ll meet Alexander Shumsky, the man credited with pushing fashion week into the digital age ?

A photo posted by Electric_Runway (@electric_runway) on Oct 26, 2016 at 12:37pm PDT

Next week, we’ll round out this episode and take you inside MBFW Russia’s Fashion Futurum Startup Show. Stay tuned to our YouTube channel for our video recap, too!