Photo courtesy of kk+ via flickr
Marevska
This is a guest post from Anna Marevska, print manager at Cision.
Fashion month officially kicked off last week with New York Fashion Week, a seven-day celebration of American designers. This season, more than ever – thanks to bloggers, live-streaming, social media and new influencer partnerships – fashion is communicated differently.
For starters, IMG Fashion – who own and operate fashion events around the word – partnered with Rightster (a video distribution service) to deliver a live stream, for the first time, from every Fall 2013 show at Lincoln Center, providing an innovative solution for designers to connect with buyers, press and consumers around the globe. It has proven quite the concept for IMG, who in addition, also offered video on-demand for all shows and presentations, and enabled website publishers to embed the live stream onto their own platforms for free.
This fashion week also further solidified the social media phenomenon known as the fashion blogger. Designers and fashion houses have been more open than ever to this new generation of self-made editors, and fashion brand publicists engaged with the blogosphere through Twitter, Pinterest, Instagtram and Vine, and offered the much-coveted “inside the tents” look of back stage fashion goers, after parties and front row.
The chaos of Fashion Week is also captured through various partnerships between industry insiders and designer labels, and of course with the help of social media. The Morgans Hotel Group, for example, teamed up with designer Richard Chai for the week leading up to his catwalk, where Chai’s team blogged about the show’s model castings, fittings and makeup prep.
Famous fashion blogger Shea Marie from PeaceLoveShea, was named fashion ambassador for the hotel group, and took over @morganshotels Instagram where she posted backstage images at fashion shows, parties and designer meetings.
Of course, I can’t write a post about Fashion Week without mentioning Pinterest. Many designers and brand publicists have taken matters into their own hands and offered exclusive coverage of show preparation, front row guests, inspirations, fittings and more. CFDA, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week and Oscar PR Girl are a few favorites.
But amidst all this excitement, and despite the fact that New York Fashion week is the Olympics for American fashion, there are designers who opted out all together from showing at the Lincoln Center. Well-established designers, like Joy Cioci, told the Wall Street Journal that the New York calendar “was crowded… and hectic for buyers and editors.” Instead, she’s settled for a March showing when editors can really pay attention to her collection.
Other designers who opted out of Fashion Week are creating carefully curated and produced videos of their collections. This way they can send the video to stores, editors and bloggers, use it for advertising, put it on YouTube and ultimately reach fashion enthusiasts around the globe.
It is obvious that information boundaries no longer exist in the fashion industry, and social media and technology have become huge game changers. Luckily that also means a wider audience and ultimately bigger exposure for your clients.
Anna Marevska is print media manager at Cision and also is the founder and editor of Fashion Files Magazine. She was listed as one of the 6 must-follow Chicagoans during NYFW 2012.
