Escada stock prices over the last 5 days, courtesy of Google Finance

Escada Board to Meet on Insolvency After Bondholders Snub Offer (Bloomberg)
“Escada AG, the luxury clothing company whose dresses are worn by Demi Moore, is holding a board meeting today to discuss a plan to file for insolvency after bondholders rejected its financial rescue proposal.”

Micro trends making major fashion statements this autumn (Telegraph)
“Brace yourselves as ‘slow-burning trends’, such as thigh-high boots and shoulder pads, hit the big time this season.”

Claudia Schiffer to address IHT’s Berlin luxury conference (MNI)
“The International Herald Tribune (IHT) has announced that Claudia Schiffer will join the lineup of high-profile speakers at its annual luxury conference where she will talk about the challenges of maintaining and protecting your global image in a digital world where fashion and celebrity media platforms have proliferated.”

Playing to the Middle (New York Times)
“Why would this perennially square department store bother to reanimate itself in Manhattan – in the sleekest, scariest fashion city in America – during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself?”

VAT increase to cost retailers £90m (Drapers)
“The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has forecast that the return of VAT to 17.5% on January 1 will cost retailers £90m, as the Conservative party refused to rule out raising VAT further if they come to power.”

No Editions, courtesy of No Editions

NEW YORK, United States —Back in March 2008, when Fast Company published a report on “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” not one fashion or luxury brand (or their parent companies) made the list. This is unfortunate, not least because many of the world’s most successful fashion and luxury brands have a strong heritage of experimentation and innovation. (Louis Vuitton, for example, began by creating a lightweight, airtight trunk of a kind the world had never seen). Only a few months ago, this lack of innovation may have looked like a missed opportunity. But in 2009, it seems positively suicidal.

In today’s tough economy, many fashion brands face an existential choice: innovate radically and re-energise consumers with new thinking, new ideas and new products — or risk failure. Radical innovation means reinventing what fashion can be.  And nowhere is radical innovation needed more than in fashion’s approach to new digital technologies.

Over the last few seasons, forward-thinking designers like Basso & Brooke and Carri Cassette Playa have embraced the captivating visual possibilities of digital printing. But one of the most interesting things about digital printing is its ability to create unique, individualized designs through minor variations in the print, so no one piece is exactly the same as another.

Indeed, Hintmag recently blogged about a new label called No Editions: “designers Christian Niessen (who hails from Helmut Lang and Prada) and Nicole Lachelle (Helmut Lang) have devised a system of digital printing where each piece in a series (i.e. T-shirts, tunics, ponchos or kimonos) looks deceptively similar, but subtle differences are revealed upon closer inspection.” Clothing that is individualized, but remains true to a designer’s vision, is a compelling concept. But there’s something even bigger here. Could an individualised, digitally printed piece do more than just look individual? Could it say something personal about the wearer? Could clothing actually communicate?

With this question in mind, I stopped by the Stephen Sprouse retrospective at Deitch Projects. On a wall of the artist-designer’s illustrations was a sketch of a broad-shouldered, hooded jacket with a print that referenced a supermarket barcode. That got me thinking. More than stripy things for supermarket scanners, today’s barcodes (known as “Quick Response” or QR codes) function like online links. To “click” on them, you just point and shoot them with your camera phone and they retrieve relevant information on your phone’s web browser.

In Japan, McDonald’s customers can point and shoot the barcodes on their hamburger wrapping and get nutritional information on their screens, while barcodes on advertising for H&M let impulse buyers shop straight from billboards. Even highly design-sensitive brands like Gucci are using customised codes to link print advertising in Japanese fashion magazines to mobile websites.

While the technology is most popular in Japan, where code-reading software comes pre-installed on mobile phones, last spring London department store Harrod’s ran a campaign using QR codes to promote its “Design Icons” exhibition (featuring Vivienne Westwood) and for Fall 2008, New York-based retailer Ralph Lauren put QR codes on print ads to drive people to their new mobile commerce site.

Now, a Dutch company called W-41 has put QR codes on clothing. Each shirt they make is printed with a unique code that links to a webpage the wearer selects. It could be your Facebook page, your Flickr photos, or a song on Apple’s iTunes — any URL you choose. This way, your clothing can actually communicate something about you — something personal that you choose and can change as often as you wish, just like your Facebook status. In their own words, “W-41 is techfashion.” But unfortunately, both the codes and the clothing are aesthetically unappealing.

That’s where digital printing comes in.

Since 2006, a Silicon Valley start-up called SnapTell has been experimenting with image recognition technology that lets people use camera phones to point and shoot print advertising, outdoor billboards, product packaging, logos and other visuals — and retrieve information — without clunky barcodes. Using the same technology, it’s not hard to imagine an application that lets you point and shoot individualized, digitally printed fashion and accessories (like the pieces produced by No Editions) and link through to a URL that communicates something personal about the wearer, or lets you connect with them on a social network.

Fashion is a powerful and playful form of self-expression. Now, through a radical application of digital printing and mobile technology, the opportunity exists for brands to do something revolutionary: create clothes and accessories with a layer of interactivity (“virtual layering” anyone?) that offers new possibilities for expressing individuality and mood. While it can be argued that this makes less sense at the high end of the market, for high street brands like Topshop, Uniqlo and H&M, whose target audience is young and active online, it’s an exciting opportunity to create a whole new product category that lets customers make a fashion statement that’s fit for the wired world they inhabit.

Now, that’s the kind of radical innovation I hope to see from forward-thinking fashion brands in 2009.

Vikram Alexei Kansara is a digital strategist and writer based in New York.

Yesterday I met with James Killough, an innovative London-based film maker, who happens to have a film in pre-production that may end up being one of the first real films about the fashion industry — or so everybody tells me.

More to the point, James also talked to me about the potentially powerful combination of the Internet, video and the luxury industry and cited an innovative video project directed by Olivier Dahan, the renowned French film-maker, who collaborated with Cartier on a series of 12 videos for its Love collection.

I took a gander at the videos today, and was impressed — not only with Cartier’s forward-thinking use of video to create a narrative behind one of its most important iconic lines, but also with the stories themselves, which were engaging and, sometimes even moving.

There’s always a risk that this kind of approach will come off as gimmicky — but for the most part, I think Cartier has avoided this (though it’s creation of ‘Cartier Love Day‘ smacks of Hallmark’s exploitation of Valentine’s day as an excuse to convince people to spend money, even if Cartier has tried to mask this by inviting celebrities to raise money for charity as part of the festivities). Nonetheless, if you have some time to watch the entire video series together, I’d highly recommend it

In a completely different, but equally effective use of video, I also came across this cheeky and fun video for the Sergio Rossi brand. It’s interesting to note the innovative things that Gucci Group brands are doing online.

It’s something we should begin to see more and more of, especially as it dawns on luxury companies that the Internet can provide an excellent tableau for low cost permission-based marketing through videos. Imagine the difference between showing a video to someone who wants to see it, versus interrupting someone with a commercial when they want to be watching something else.

NEW YORK, United States – I’m sure you’ve all had one of those moments when a friend or colleague picked up your phone by accident, because it looked the exactly the same as theirs. I know it’s happened to me on more than one occasion. Today, Paul Taylor of the FT cleverly compared the uniform style and design of most mobile phones to the Ford Model T, when Henry Ford declared that “the customer can have any colour he wants, so long as it’s black”.

Just the other day, we dove into the marriage of fashion and technology for the first time, looking at the emergence of the fashion phone. But, the ideas, questions and suggestions have kept coming since then, begging the question: is now the right time not only for bringing a little fashion to technology, but also for bringing a little technology to fashion?

New York-based Angel Chang thinks so. She is one designer who is integrating new technologies into her designs.

For example, she developed this self-heating cashmere vest in partnership with Noble Biomaterials, the silver fibers suppliers to the U.S. Army. She also collaborated with RedMaps to develop a dress that reveals a map of New York when the wearer blows on it. Instantly practical it may not be, but thought-provoking it certainly is.

Angel sent us this in-depth study, entitled “Engineers are from Mars. Fashion Designers are from Venus” on the potential for bridging the seemingly enormous gap between techies and fashionistas. For anyone who is interesting in this emerging space, it is a must-read.

In the report, Angel demonstrates that design and style are increasingly important decision factors in the purchase of consumer electronics, and the growing number of fashion phones in the market indicates that both mobile phone manufacturers and fashion brands are beginning to recognise this, particularly as women play more important roles in technology purchases.