rockin robin, tweet, tweet, tweet-a-leet

A continuation of sorts from the last post (I refuse to give up this theme it seems), this one will cover a different aspect of social media, microblogs, or more specifically, Twitter. I’ve briefly touched on this before, in explaining the new accessibility of high fashion as Twitter is used by industry insiders to give followers sneak-peaks at runway collections.

A large portion of the general populace is still undecided and quite skeptical over the service, but despite this, Twitter still manages to boast more than 165 million registered users. Allowing users to publish short 140-character posts with links to photos, videos and external websites on top of personal commentary, the service has managed to take the business world by storm. Mentioned in the context of showing viewers quick snaps of runway photos, Twitter’s main draw is not the access it gives to the average fashion consumer but ask any marketer and the answer lies in the buzzword of the day/year/decade: interactivity.

social media: twitter

A key aspect of the new trend of Web 2.0, interactivity between business partners, business competition, and most of all between businesses and their consumers, has become a crucial competitive advantage in the race for customers, their loyalty and most of all their wallets. Perhaps the poster-child for the interactive social brand, Starbucks (the preferred drink of the fashion elite) has turned this into an idea-generating, customer-loyalty-inducing business advantage. In the world of high fashion however, the brands are less focused on assuring their customers’ drink-purchasing experience was the best it could possibly be but into a forum where they can interact with their customers and fans to gain insight into what is liked and what isn’t, to publish secret contests and giveaways just to the Twitter followers, to give the average follower a glimpse into the inner workings of a fashion brand. Instead of maintaining the allure and mystery of a secretive high fashion brand, many such as DKNY and Marc Jacobs have hired full-time employees assigned to care for the company’s Twitter account- seen as another public face for the company and brand. All these short posts about the company on the inside spark conversation- between the brand and its consumers and even between consumers themselves; Twitter is a great way to get free marketing by way of being the topic of discussion.

this is not: the bob loblaw law blog

In the last of this series exploring the effect of the internet on the high fashion industry, I will cover a topic of particular interest to me (and the marketing divisions of companies worldwide)- Social Media: Blogs.

In the beginning, there was a blog. Or two. Or three. The internet was a place where a girl living in rural Kansas could connect and discuss her avid interest in the 1987 Fall collection by Yves St Laurent (see here if you really are interested) with other similarly interested persons around the globe. There were message boards, forums and then there were blogs. By 2005 and 2006, fashion bloggers- usually young women posting about their everyday outfits, commentary on the recent collections shown in Paris or Milan, and fashion trend spotting, were quickly gaining momentum in the form of increased readership and attention. As an industry, fashion is very trend driven and companies and professionals in the industry found the blogs to be a particularly salient mode of keeping abreast of the trends, knowing what the consumers liked and didn’t like and even using the blogs and the bloggers themselves as inspiration. 

social media: blogs

Despite their relative newness (Chanel has been around as a fashion house since 1909), blogs and the bloggers that wrote them grew to have surprising influence over the high fashion industry. Blogs that specialized in photography specifically shots snapped in the middle of the street of well-dressed random strangers, rose to prominence and featured in online versions of magazines worldwide. The pioneer of this movement was blogger Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist who managed to garner widespread industry respect for his work, photography work contracts shooting ad campaigns for brands like DKNY, and in 2009 published an anthology of his street-style photos. There have been similar instances of fashion bloggers receiving modeling contracts or stints as guest designers for a particular brand due to the popularity and aesthetic of their blog.

Another instance where bloggers exerted considerable influence on the fashion industry is that of Tavi Gevinson and the high fashion brand Rodarte. The founders and designers of the Rodarte brand itself, two sisters from Pasadena, CA, were discovered to be massive fans of a fashion blog written by the now 13-year old Gevinson who is the proprietor of the blog Style Rookie. The Rodarte sisters allowed released a collaboration collection with the American chain Target in 2009 and Tavi has been cited as an influence on the design of the collection itself; the blogger was also allowed backstage access to the unveiling presentation of the collection (if you don’t want to feel eons older than you presently are, don’t click here). 

Along similar lines, the fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana seated fashion bloggers front row at their Spring 2010 runway show, a previously unheard of instance in the fashion industry. 

(International Herald Tribune's Suzy Menkes; Vanity Fair's Michael Roberts; BryanBoy; 

Vogue's Sally Singer, Anna Wintour and Hamish Bowles; and Tommy Ton)

 

The industry is extremely hierarchical and old-fashioned in a way, so for new upstarts like bloggers BryanBoy and Tommy Ton to be seated between powerful fashion editors, reporters and A-list celebrities was a major shift and nod to the influence social media held on the staid fashion industry. 

In June 2009, the American FTC ruled that bloggers must disclose whenever an item they featured was gifted to them for free or when they had been paid to write a particular piece. This was previously standard practice at fashion magazine.

Blogs are not just a source of new ideas, but also a media force to be reckoned with as fans, critics, and advertising mediums. The wave of fashion blogs and their continuing influence on the industry shows the narrowing gap between professionals and amateurs, and the brand and its customers.

shop til you drop

In a more direct reference to our course, the next topic to be covered in this series is Online Retail. The concept has been around in various forms for about a decade and a half with the invention of the internet. Aside from companies like Amazon and eBay, independent entrepreneurs sought to make some money on the web. The discovery and monetization of the Long Tail allowed profits to be made in an area of business that wasn’t available before the internet. Brick and mortar stores started to realize the existence of opportunities available online, bringing us back to our topic at hand.

the online retail of fashion

In the past few years, brick and mortar stores realized they could reach a LOT more customers in a much larger geographical area if they opened themselves up to the Internet. They weren’t limited to those customers who lived within driving distance of a store outpost; they could expand their potential market exponentially. On top of this, online retail allowed shoppers to shop at their own pace at a time of day convenient to them- not limited by store hours. Companies that have an established online presence include Gap, Urban Outfitters and for the high-end fashion, Barneys New York.

On the other hand, there are many online-only retail organizations that are in the business of high fashion. Companies such as shopbop, Zappos, and NET-A-PORTER all offer highly customizable shopping experiences online, all in the comfort of your own home!

Lately, a new trend has emerged in high fashion online retail, that of online sample sales. Sites such as Hautelook and Gilt Groupe offer members discounts of up to 70% and over on high fashion, luxury brands during timed online events.

hocus pocus: chic in focus

As an industry, fashion, particularly high fashion has been at the forefront of incorporating information technology into their businesses, shifting their brick-and-mortar business model to one that is a hybrid between the old and the new online e-business. High fashion and luxury retail are industries where advertising revenue is especially indispensable; as such, the companies often have a large amount of capital to expend on their corporate brand image to establish themselves as the vanguard of ‘cool’.

This post will cover the first of a few major trends I have identified within this shift to the online world.

accessibility

Previously, if the average person wanted to view Chanel’s most recent runway collection, they could either see it in magazines a month or two after the actual runway show or they could fly to Paris and sit in and watch the show for themselves (not usually an option for the average devotee). With improvements in photo technology and the internet, high-quality images from the runway are available online minutes after a show is presented, accessible by anybody with an internet connection anywhere in the world.  

( Image courtesy of Style.com)

A step up and even faster, fashion industry insiders are able to grant exclusive access to these shows through the genius medium of microblogging- specifically Twitter. These industry insiders “tweet” their reactions and/or play-by-play commentary as they sit front row at these fashion shows in Paris or Milan, with all of this taking place in real-time. Followers of these posts can keep up with the shows as they are presented. Although restricted to 140-character limits and blurry mobile phone pictures uploaded to related online services, users are able to gain real-time understanding of the fashion collections; an understanding which is fully fleshed out once the professional photos are uploaded to Style.com after the show. An example of a top industry professional who tweets is Joe Zee, the Creative Director of Elle Magazine (@JoeZee).

Finally, the latest technology trend to hit the runways is broadcasting a live-stream of the fashion show worldwide. Again accessible by anyone with an internet connection, illustrious fashion houses such as Burberry and Louis Vuitton have jumped on the bandwagon recently, live-streaming their shows from London and Paris to viewers worldwide.

And what does this all boil down to? 

In a word, accessibility. These high fashion brands were previously only accessible by persons with enough excess income to afford the flight to Paris and the $4000 purses and $1000 t-shirts . With information technology, these brands were able to expand their audience exponentially and connect with fans living miles away from the fashion capitals of the world. This essentially is a massive expansion of their potential market, providing endless business opportunities and in this era, new crowd-sourcing opportunities.