CURATORS CONFERENCE
Curation emerged online several years ago as a digital buzzword, a tip of the hat to the individuals that served as cultural tastemakers. More often than not, these men and women developed a certain aesthetic harmony in anything from food to fashion to furniture and, in turn, shared it with readers in the form of quick fixes of premium digital content.
Of course, as is often the case, a market was born, and now everyone is a curator. Pinterest, which allow users to create instant feeds of images picked up around the web, is worth over a billion dollars, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter are making it easier each day for users to promote information across platforms. There’s the text-heavy, the video-focused, and the photo-driven, each accessible to consumers at no cost.
Clearly, though, as anyone with an overly-clogged news feed would argue, there’s still the matter of taste. The creative interests of your high school classmates are, more often than not, somewhere near the bottom of your list of things that matter. Conversely, sites like the Fancy, Refinery29, and Cool Hunting provide an increasingly selective alternative—their content, which ranges across almost all creative fields, serves as a barometer of the state of the industries they highlight.
On Wednesday, September 5, New York-based fashion-focused video platform Portable will host the Curators Conference—a day-long event bringing together the creatives who, deep down, dictate fine design by harnessing the power of digital publishing. Through a series of intriguing conversations, filmmakers, designers, publishers, and entrepreneurs will discuss the way their media “intersect with modern culture, to share strategies and encourage conversation and ideas.”
With a slight technology-based underlining—this is, after all, about digital content—the focus here is fashion, an industry that has truly harnessed the opportunities allowed by online platforms. Philippe von Borries and Piera Gelardi, co-founders of leading fashion site Refinery29, Susie Bubble of Style Bubble, and Chris Corrado of fashion tradeshow Capsule will look at the fashion industry through the wide lens of the digital market, ways to exploit it, and how its reflexive capabilities are connecting industries once significantly distinct.
Rounding out the lineup will be the creators of the content these individuals highlight—filmmaker Gia Coppola, whose clients include Opening Ceremony, Diane von Furstenberg, and Zac Posen; director Warren Fu, whose work includes music videos for Daft Punk, Mark Ronson, and the Strokes; Carrie Scott, founder and managing partner of CS&P Art Advisory; and Josh Rubin, founder of Cool Hunting. Together, they’ll provide an understanding of the creation of content itself—the tools and media deployed to place fashion, for the first time, at the forefront of digital life.
The Curators Conference will take place tomorrow, September 5, from 9AM to 6PM at the Walter Reade Theatre, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. For tickets, please visit CuratorsConference.Eventbrite.com.
