Fashion after the coronavirus: no fashion weeks and a more personalised experience, Chinese online retailer foresees

Small-scale, direct-to-consumer brands will emerge stronger from Covid-19 shutdown, Ada Yi Zhao of online fashion platform Curated Crowd believes

Customers won’t be lured by big players discounting, but by labels with a story to tell. As for fashion weeks, they ‘are not going to happen any more’, she says

Reading Time:3 minutes

Ada Yi Zhao, founder of Curated Crowd, thinks that, after the coronavirus pandemic, “the all-singing and -dancing events like fashion weeks are not going to happen”.

Published: 5:00am, 24 Jun 2020Updated: 6:40pm, 24 Jun 2020

The magnitude of the threat the coronavirus pandemic posed to her online fashion platform Curated Crowd hit home for Ada Yi Zhao in March. She had to shut down her pop-up store in the well-heeled St John’s Wood neighbourhood of London in accordance with lockdown measures.

The former investment banker, who comes from Chengdu, western China, had flashbacks to the 2008 financial crisis.

“Given the general economic conditions, I was very scared. Our lifeline is based on curating a great selection of designers worldwide and my immediate response at that time was, ‘How many of our designers are actually going to survive the crisis and how many will be able to keep their businesses going?’” she said.

Three months on, and as she prepared to reopen her pop-up store, she looked back on the lessons learned and considered how the future of fashion may look.

Zhao shut down her London pop-up store for three months during the coronavirus.

Zhao found that designers who rely on selling wholesale to department stores have been very hard hit, while smaller labels have ridden out the storm in better shape.