Week in Review | David Collins, The Store is Everywhere, Alexandre de Betak, Top 10 Campaigns, Digital Rankings, Dissecting Fashion’s Deal Frenzy

LONDON, United Kingdom — Some very sad news came as quite a shock to the fashion community this week. David Collins, a talented interior designer and architect tasked with creating new retail concepts for Alexander McQueen and Jimmy Choo, passed away at the age of 58 due to complications relating to a virulent form of skin cancer that was diagnosed only three weeks ago.

As I went about my work this week, meeting with people here in London, we often paused to remember David, his sense of humour and, of course, his great talent. I am so glad that I had the opportunity to meet him and that we had the chance to feature him and his amazing career here on BoF.

While David was known for designing beautiful, gem-like stores, we explored stores of a completely different kind this week. In a fascinating Fashion 2.0 piece, Vikram Alexei Kansara predicted that "ubiquitous computing" or "everywhere computing" will have far-ranging implications for fashion retail, so that "the entire world becomes a store in which you can instantly buy almost anything you see."

It’s a pretty bold vision of the future. Could you really visually scan your favourite street-style star outside the shows with your Internet-connected eyeglasses, identify the items they are wearing, find them online and order them in an instant? The experts we spoke to insisted that yes, this kind of reality is really not that far away. It’s staggering how quickly technology is transforming our lives.

Alexandre de Betak is the kind of fashion professional who already creates his own reality. A talented and highly-respected fashion show and event producer, Betak spoke to BoF about the nuts and bolts of his work, offering a month-by-month, week-by-week and, even, minute-by-minute view of what goes into creating a world-class fashion show.

Indeed, Mr Betak has engineered fashion moments that have gone down in history, including the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show that, in 2000, famously crashed the company's website and Raf Simons' unforgettable Dior debut couture show, last summer, where 1 million flowers decorated the walls of several rooms of an hôtel particulier in Paris.

Mr Simons' work for Dior also appeared on our list of the ten most exciting advertising campaigns for Autumn/Winter 2013. But at the top of our ranking was Kenzo's striking set of surrealist images created by Pierpaolo Ferrari, Maurizio Cattelan and Micol Talso of provocative art magazine Toilet Paper. Have a look at our selection and tell us what you think.

Then there was my column about the digital and social media rankings which have flooded our sector in recent years. Many of these rankings have questionable underlying methodologies and draw implausible conclusions. Judging by tweets from digitally savvy fashion influencers like John Jannuzzi, Aliza Licht and Dina Fierro, the article seems to have touched a nerve. Indeed, as Vanessa Friedman, fashion editor of the Financial Times tweeted, they apparently "exist largely to scare brands into signing the researchers as consultants." I completely agree.

L2, the New York based think tank, responded constructively, saying: "[Our] approach is that rankings are the starting point of a framework for brands to evaluate their digital investments."

And today, we published a piece analysing the wave of IPOs and acquisitions in the fashion and luxury industry in recent years. We dug below the headlines to unearth the drivers of the recent deal flow and made some predictions about which brands might be next to sell to the big luxury conglomerates LVMH and Kering, or raise money on the public markets. What seems clear is that the private equity players, for the most part, are steering clear from fashion investing as the time horizons for their exits, and the general lack of industry knowledge and culture, has made this space treacherous for them in the past.

With heat waves on both sides of the Atlantic this weekend, I am sure you’ll be out and about soaking in the rays. But don’t forget to catch up on all that is going on in the business of fashion, so you are ready for another week come Monday.

And, in the meantime, we are looking for a talented Editorial Apprentice to join our team. You can learn more about the role on our Jobs and Contributors page.