Ken Downing, senior vice president and fashion director, Neiman Marcus: We would actually welcome the idea of strong fashion imagery and that fashion message being closer to the selling period. I think the challenge is for the press—who are so hungry to deliver information earlier than competitive publications or get it earlier than what’s happening on the Internet. I mean, we as retailers would actually welcome the idea of the big message of the fashion shows happening closer to the selling time.

Tom Murry, CEO, Calvin Klein: It’s very difficult to either make money or keep from losing a lot of money in a collection business, so I think that [retail-timed shows] would be really difficult to pull off. The other point is that consumers are buying later and later and later, yet the preseasons are getting proportionately bigger and bigger and bigger.

Tommy Hilfiger: I think that we need both. We should have shows for the press and the buyers, early, as we do now. We should also have shows showing the consumer what is at retail, what it should look like on a person, how it’s accessorized, and romance it a bit. For a business like ours, it would be very beneficial.

Ed Burstell, buying director, Liberty: The importance of runway shows to retailers continues to decrease, but they aren’t dead yet! You can certainly tell if a collection is good by watching it online, but you cannot tell if it is a “landmark” collection—that magic does not yet come through on the screen.

Roland Mouret: I would love if my customers could see the show and then go online and have it the next day. Today, it is all about serving the end customer…. I think the magazines in general are missing something today—they’re not giving the customers worldwide an intimate, personal message about the clothes.

Wen Zhou, CEO, 3.1 Phillip Lim: Live streaming doesn’t [negatively] affect [current retail]. There’s direct-to-consumer marketing for news, but what’s in the stores now is what girls want now.

We don’t know how to project what to buy, how to produce—it takes four to six months to produce what we’re going to show. The best idea is to shift the shows later and shift the deliveries later to be more in season. [Last month] if you looked outside, it was a blizzard, but you couldn’t find a pair of gloves in the stores. Everyone in the industry recognizes the problem but no one is really addressing it on the bigger picture. We have to really look at the pros and cons of this and figure out how to change this.

Sarah Rutson, fashion director, Lane Crawford: We’re all in the market for five weeks, spending 25 percent of the budget on runway collections, and yet we shoot out just five days for 75 percent of the budget on pre-collections. Can someone explain that to me? Pre-collections need to become the circus, in January and June.

Thakoon Panichgul: Do I think that live streaming is going to become the norm? It feels like it’s already that. From seeing McQueen live stream last season, and then all of a sudden this season, 20 designers did it. It’s almost like everyone is already doing it, and it feels kind of old already. It might become one of those things, like you need to do a look book, you need to live stream.