Dive Brief:

• Nordstrom, along with Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, and People magazine, is styling and dressing nominees and presenters at the 70th Tony Awards show June 12 in New York. 

• The retailer, the show’s official sponsor, is jumping on the trend of making fashion items available as soon as they’re seen by live-streaming the red carpet on its blog The Thread and making accessories worn by attendees available for purchase immediately online. Vogue, Entertainment Weekly and People will also be hosting the live stream on their websites. 

• The Tony Awards could see a record viewership considering the massive popularity of the Broadway hit "Hamilton," which is up for 16 separate awards.

Dive Insight:

Several upscale brands are abandoning the usual six month or so wait between runway and retail, because, as many experts say, the consumer just doesn’t want to wait. Fast fashion, with its penchant for bringing knock-off designs swiftly into stores, has helped accelerate demand for the real thing. Nordstrom's latest move to "see now, buy now" shopping is just another reiteration of this. 

“Nordstrom is buying the ability to connect dots to data to drive desire and sales,”  Chris Ramey, president of Affluent Insights, told Luxury Daily. “Impulse buying is essential for fashion. The ability to measure those impulses is immense.; the ability to turn them into instant revenue is gold.”

Burberry may be the most high-profile brand to expedite the availability of items seen on its runways, but Tom Ford, Michael Kors, Thakoon Panichgul, and Rebecca Minkoff have also drastically reduced the time they take to bring designs to market after their fashion shows. The alterations to this longstanding tradition come at a time when luxury retailers are struggling somewhat, in part due to the strong dollar and self-inflicted wounds like the dilution of their brands through discounts and outlet sales.

While "see now, buy now" seems a long time coming, it's actually untested—as Luxury Daily notes, Nordstrom still hasn’t made it clear how it is going to distinguish which items on the red carpet are available for sale. Limiting the items for purchase to accessories will make that easier to execute, and protects the show from becoming a retail event, Ramey told Luxury Daily.

In any case, it’s certainly an acknowledgement that consumers, even in the rarified world of luxury retail, are in control.