At first blush, it may seem like fashion and technology have a cozy relationship. New designers are building their brands almost entirely on Instagram, and for many of us, e-commerce has fully replaced brick-and-mortar shopping. We experience entire fashion shows via live-stream; we juggle emails, Slacks, and texts 24 hours a day; and we really can’t be separated from our phones. In reality, though, there’s actually a great distance between the worlds of fashion and tech—so great, in fact, that both sides are missing out on what the other has to offer. Timo Weiland, who formerly designed his namesake label with Donna Kang and Alan Eckstein (they now run a creative consultancy group together), came to that realization with his friend Noah Gellman, a venture-capital and startup veteran. “We noticed a large gap had appeared between the fashion retail industry and the global Silicon Valley,” Gellman says. “Despite the availability of amazing new technologies and novel business models, we could not understand why the fashion industry wasn’t adopting these innovations or adapting their businesses.”
One reason may be that “tech people” and “fashion people” practically speak different languages. Their worlds are vastly different: Tech is (at least traditionally) objective and straightforward, whereas fashion is subjective, artistic, and emotional. Trying to meet in the middle can feel next to impossible, but Weiland and Gellman knew there was a way to fix this. Their solution is The Lead, which Gellman describes as “the bridge” between the fashion and technology communities. Through The Lead, he and Weiland are producing a quarterly publication; hosting industry events for fashion, tech, and retail leaders; and planning major summits to bring together influential brands, next-generation technology companies, and more of the people who work in those worlds. “We want to know what and how the other is thinking,” Gellman says.
The Lead’s first-ever summit in June focused on the “Defiant 25,” a group of leaders and risk takers whom The Lead identified as individuals who had successfully used technology to transform their businesses. That group included David Lauren, vice chairman and chief innovation officer at Ralph Lauren; Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president of retail at Apple; Gregory Boutte, chief client and digital officer at Kering (Gucci); and Yael Aflalo, founder and CEO of Reformation, among many others.
