Videos shared online show event attendees looking at accessories stationed along the runway as drones carried dresses, shirts and purses down the catwalk.
— عشاق عالم الطيران (@AviationWG) June 4, 2018
Ali Nabil Akbar, one of the organizers of the event, told BBC Arabic that the decision to go with drones was to make sure that the show was "Ramadan appropriate," adding that it took some two weeks to figure out how best to arrange the event.
"Everything involved innovation," he told the publication.
The innovation, however, went out the door once netizens caught wind of the fashionista drones.
One Twitter user was having horror movie flashbacks, tweeting, "a fashion show in Saudi Arabia is like a ghost film."
— واحد oNe (@wa7d_riyadh) June 7, 2018
Another captioned the clip with: "A ghost show in Saudi Arabia. I mean a fashion show."
— جالينـــــــوس (@ilxooli) June 7, 2018
But not everyone was so critical of the fashion-forward decision.
"It's great to think out of the box. They were trying to do something different and fashion is such a creative space," Alia Khan, chairwoman of the Islamic Fashion & Design Council in the United Arab Emirates, told CNN. "However, this was not really something I would encourage or would like to see again."
"When you see empty clothes flying in the air, it's just unappealing and not mesmerizing or beautiful. There wasn't much to make me feel enticed to try that outfit," Khan added.
According to Time, this wasn't the first time drones have strut, erm, hovered, their stuff on the runway. In February, Dolce & Gabbana used drones to display the fashion house's new line of handbags.
