There has always been a culture gap between the worlds of fashion and technology. That’s what fueled entrepreneur Liz Bacelar to start Decoded Fashion in 2011, a series of digital summits that aimed at bridging that chasm. “What I saw back then was technology being fascinated with fashion, but fashion itself wasn’t seeing a gre ...

Despite the flurry of activity, some experts wonder if hackathons are becoming more of a marketing ploy than a function for change. “Many events that brands call ‘hackathons’ are really ‘ideathons,’” says Liz Bacelar, co-founder of Current Global, who produced what she considers fashion’s first hackathon in 2013.

Kevin Abosh, one of the world's most renowned visual artists, unveiled a series of portraits of Silicon Valley's most influential female figures and voices in tech.  Alongside the likes of Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg , Apple's Angela Ahrendts, and Decoded Fashion’s Liz Bacelar. 

Liz Bacelar has been straddling the line of fashion and technology since the days when fashion-tech meant LED lights on jackets and a slew of fashion apps designed in pink.

In 2011, Bacelar launched Decoded Fashion, an event series that connects entrepreneurs with fashion brands and designers. She left the company in 2016 and has since launched a new business, TheCurrent, a platform that matches brands with technology solutions.

It was inspired by Bacelar’s belief that fashion companies have limits to the tech they can pull off on their own.

“The talk of the town today is open innovation,” she said. “That means recognizing that there are boundaries to what you can do. You cannot be a tech company, but you should be a digitally minded company.”

WWD features TheCurrent bridges the divide between fashion, lifestyle, beauty and tech. “When you innovate internally, you can’t move as fast as you are [restrained] by the company’s limitations. An open-innovation [process] can filter all that is going on, and then you can act fast [on what’s important to you],” Bacelar said. 

Half of the attendees are new to Texas hold 'em; the rest learned at Messer’s last game, in which newcomer Liz Bacelar, 37, who had just sold her conference series, Decoded Fashion, to a Hearst-backed media group, walked away with third place winnings (which she then donated to the night’s benefactor, the nonprofit Girl Up).