Fashion Videos

Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting and display of moving visual media — and fashion video is video recording about clothing, footwear and style-related topics. A photograph can show a garment; a video shows how it moves, how the fabric swings on a runway walk, how a collection builds from the first exit to the finale, and how the room reacted. That is why video has become the fashion industry's favourite record of itself, and why this section collects it in one place.

This guide is the front door to fashion video on Apparel Search. From here you can go straight to fashion week videos, fashion movies, television commercials or stock footage, or browse the whole field through three indexes — by designer name, by fashion week event, and by year or season. You will also find a complete filmed record of New York Fashion Week in September 2007, summaries of fashion documentaries, movies and videos, and the channels and television services where fashion video lives.

What Video Shows That a Photograph Cannot

Clothing is designed to be worn by a moving body, and runway fashion only fully exists in motion. Video captures the weight and drape of a fabric as a model turns, the construction of a garment from every angle as she walks, and the pacing of a show — the music, the order of the looks and the finale walk that tells you what the designer considers the collection's high points. For buyers comparing collections they could not attend, for students learning how shows are staged, and for designers researching how a silhouette behaved on the runway, a two-minute clip can carry more information than a gallery of stills.

Video is also fashion's memory. Collections are shown once, to a few hundred people in a room; the recording is what survives. Fashion week videos shot a decade or more ago are now primary sources for trend research, because past developments regularly re-emerge in new collections, and the fastest way to check what a silhouette or a styling idea looked like the last time it appeared is to watch it walk.

The Collections in This Section

The fashion week videos guide gathers runway video sources — the big video platforms, the fashion press and specialist archives — together with Apparel Search's own filmed fashion week coverage. The fashion movies section profiles the films in which fashion itself is the subject or the setting, from the garment-business satire Garmento to The Devil Wears Prada and Coco Before Chanel. The fashion commercials section covers television advertising for clothing and accessories, and the stock fashion videos directory explains where producers license professional fashion footage for their own websites and publications.

Three indexes cut across all of it. If you know whose work you want to watch, start with fashion videos by designer name or brand. If you know the show, use fashion videos by fashion week event. If you are researching a period or a season — what was shown for a particular fall or spring — use fashion videos by year or season. The summaries section adds reading to the watching: a fashion documentaries summary, a fashion movie summary and a fashion videos summary collect the site's written guides to each form.

Fashion Television and Fashion Channels

Fashion video did not begin with the web. Fashion television — dedicated channels and programmes covering collections, designers and style — built the audience that online video inherited, and the term is defined in the fashion terms section. Apparel Search keeps its own presence on video platforms: the Apparel Search fashion channel on YouTube carries fashion video for the industry, and the Apparel Search on YouTube page explains where to find it. Between the channels, the indexes and the archives gathered here, most fashion video worth watching is no more than a few clicks away.