Every year, many women (and men) around the world wait in
anticipation for New York Fashion Week. It ended as quickly as it began. Now commences our
long wait until September 2014 for the next fashion week. As the revelations of
new collections and trends wind down, I feel that it is fitting to write about
the world of fashion for this week’s blog.
I personally have been a fan of fashion blogs and vlogs.
Many bloggers are people who have experienced, first hand, the wonders and
excitement of the fashion world. Through a good blogger (with a good camera), I
feel like I can live in the fast paced fashion industry. I follow the
Instagrams, Twitters, and Pinterests of my favorite designers. Through the
instantaneous updates, I feel like I'm part of another world (away from a
constant flow of programming assignments and techy lectures).
Fashion has been a prominent part of history for as long as
people have cared about appearances. However, fashion has always been limited
to the upper class of society. Marie Antoinette had Rose Bertin, her very own
personal dressmaker. But Marie Antoinette was also the queen of France and had
all of France’s taxes at her disposal in order to afford the luxury of a
personal designer. However, the queen’s subjects couldn't dream of bread, let alone
contemplate hiring their own fashion designers. High fashion has always been
unattainable for the poor.
In recent years, social media has become a powerful presence
in the fashion industry. It has made fashion accessible to everyone. In fact,
social media thrives at events like Fashion Week. Companies such as Instagram, Twitter,
Pinterest, Tumblr, and even Sony, make it a point to find a way into fashion
week. Sony set up a mentorship program to pair up top designers with bloggers;
Google distributed google glasses to select fashion editors; various designers
launched their fall ad campaigns via Instagram. All of these powerful social
media giants are connecting aspiring fashionistas to their favorite designers.
Fashion has become more accessible than ever. Live streams blow up all over the
Internet from every fashion show, as people who are out of the fashion loop
(like me) hover over their computers to soak up the new trends. Bloggers
present at the shows start writing up their new experiences instantly on their
mobile devices, as poor college kids (like me) eagerly read and absorb every
line. According to Tumblr, “About 17 percent of the company's
top blogs are currently fashion-related.” This statistic isn’t at all
surprising to me.
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In addition to helping the general public feel more
connected to fashion, social media is helping small designers with even smaller
budgets have a chance to stretch those bills. Vlogs, product hauls, reviews,
and a simple Instagram page are all powerful (and free) advertising tools. By
using social media new designers have a chance at getting their name out into
the world, without the help of large popular brands. Social media allows
designers to receive instantaneous feedback from individuals everywhere, about
their opinions of new collections (which seem to change faster than the speed
of light).
The fashion world has seriously taken advantage of social media compared to other industries. It makes me wonder why people bother mocking the fashion world for being full of dummies. Fashion has found a way to effectively widen its scope. This industry has found a way to use social media to it's fullest potential.
Fashion, a historically exclusive industry, has become accessible to anyone and everyone who craves it. It is now possible to attend Fashion Week in many different ways (my favorite being the lives streams). Fashion feeds social media, and social media feeds fashion. It is a relationship made it heaven that will only grow stronger with time (fingers crossed).
Now, time to go catch up on fashion blogs that I missed, and
reminisce about the end of another lovely month.
Inspired by this article: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101018438
and this one: http://opentopic.com/5-ways-new-york-fashion-week-leverages-social-media/
You bring up some really interesting points about the intelligence of individuals in the fashion industry and their methods of taking advantage of social media. Personally, I feel that social media is almost magical in the way it can spread communication. Artists, for example, are able to get extremely wide exposure simply by posting on Instagram with pictures of their work, tweeting about shows, and creating an audience through a Facebook page.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I also wanted to expand on some of the social effects of social media. Because of the widespread use, cultures over the world have seemingly become more streamlined. In other words, because of these fashion blogs, one person in the United States is able to read about the same things that someone in France or Italy is reading about. These individuals are all able to follow the trends even though they are in very different parts of the world. There are, of course, many exceptions. Sometimes it takes longer for a trend to spread from one region to another, although it almost always inevitably does.
How do you feel about the streamlined gloabl fashion that has occurred because of social media? Do you think this inhibits creativity and uniqueness in a region? Or does it enable artists and designers from around the world to create more groundbreaking statements because of the heightened competition?
Thanks and once again, great post!