Liz Bacelar

Retailers want to be able to gather the same data that they gather online at their brick-and-mortar stores. Now, thanks to smartphones, retailers are increasingly able to track your every move.

Not one but two 'fashion hackathons'--one hosted by the CFDA and IMG and the other by Hearst--will take place during this coming New York fashion week. This news is pretty surprising when you consider that most fashion people probably don’t even know what a hackathon is. To explain what a hackathon is, why it’s happening during New York fashion week, and what this means for the industry, we spoke with Liz Bacelar, founder of Decoded Fashion, an organization that creates events dedicated to bringing fashion and tech together. Bacelar, along with former Lincoln Center fashion director (and, before that, director of special events at Vogue) Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, made the CFDA/IMG fashion hackathon (an official part of NYFW) happen.