Start-up Tel Aviv goes fashion forward

Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, with its shady pedestrian walkway and dozens of trendy cafes, bars and discos that line its side streets, can often feel like a catwalk. On Tuesday night, however, in conjunction with the DLD technology and innovation festival currently being held in the White City, the street took its “see and be seen” ethos one step further and hosted a live fashion show for hordes of passersby.

Rothschild Boulevard is also the unofficial capital of Israel’s start-up industry, with the majority of its entrepreneurial and tech enterprises housing themselves within spitting distance of the historic street. So it was fitting that the event was a true mash-up of technology and fashion, with 10 fashion-centric start-ups featuring their innovative ideas on the sidewalk while a handful of leggy models stomped down the pavement wearing the creations of local designers.

Sponsored by the Fash&Tech Meetup Group and Bottom Line Consulting, the runway show was the first in Israel to fully merge technology and fashion design and show both fashionistas and average consumers how cutting-edge technology can change the way they dress and select their clothes.

“Fashion is a very low-tech industry, and the high-tech industry doesn’t really understand fashion. It’s like two different worlds. But they need to collaborate because people really want to see fashion, and the high-tech world is a platform that can help make that happen,” said Ido Recanati, a local designer who exhibited in the show, as well as the head of the fashion school 6B.

Start-up products showcased at the event included Second Skin, an innovative textile based on reused plastic, by designer Elinor Rozental; Doogma – an interactive e-commerce solution for customized design; WiShi, a social styling platform that allows for personalized outfit ideas based on the contents of your closet; Citymize, a location-based shopping planner platform; Fitterli, a virtual changing room that can help solve the problem of online clothing that doesn’t fit once it arrives; Infime, which will make sure your underwear always fits right; MyClique, an interactive social commerce solution using chat applications; Zeekit; a 3-D solution for exact online fitting, Donde; an intuitive mobile search for fashion; and Stylit, which offers personalized fashion advice through both human stylists and a search engine.

Recanati says he recently closed both of his brick-and-mortar shops in Tel Aviv because consumers are shopping in different ways today, and the traditional storefront is no longer lucrative. That shift signals a crucial chance for designers and techies to collaborate.

“The minute that fashion designers and high-tech developers understand each other and understand the market, understand what customers want today, we will see the entire industry shake up,” he said. “It’s already happening, but in a very controlled way. And [this fashion show] is helping to merge the two worlds together.”