Digital Fashion Week Competes With Social Media

Due to the fact that fashion shows can not be safely held in all the fashion centers of the world in the short term, designers and fashion brands are trying to find attractive digital alternatives to share and promote their upcoming vacation and spring series. Is the best way to sell products like Chinese designers on Tmall? Is Carine Roitfeld and Derek Blasberg and a group of models and designers holding fashion shows on YouTube? Or collaborate with fashion magazines? Do you challenge yourself by shaking up on the chattering and TikTok? Or a limited time guerrilla store in Nintendo's animal game? Fashion brands tend to follow other brands to enter the unknown area, so it is very likely that some leaders will take the lead in setting the popular standards for online display. Organizations in different regions have begun to build their own digital platform to collect content. The organizers of the four fashion week are building their destinations, targeting consumers and professionals in the industry, holding digital fashion week in June and July, and competing with social media companies.

The question before the organizers of the fashion week is very realistic: how will they bring huge traffic to their platform? Will Internet and media be concerned about and spread? If you are a brand, will you be more willing to use a platform that has proved to have a better user experience, and this platform has already gathered a large number of users?

This platform may be the most desirable Instagram in fashion industry. This company hopes to occupy a pivotal position in the digital fashion week. Last Wednesday, the fashion team of the company, under the leadership of Eva Chen, vice president of fashion cooperation, released a "tactical manual" on how to organize digital fashion shows on its platform. The handbook is very comprehensive, including how to invite "fans" to watch live broadcast, display strategies behind the scenes, and how to recruit Internet red to enhance their popularity.

In the past, fashion brands had made elaborate designs for fashion shows in order to win the Instagram, from exquisite settings to front bloggers. Live show is also a standard operation. However, if there are no offline activities and no stars and net red presence, the brand needs to be more creative to stand out.

Instagram's guide will be released by regional trade organizations in New York, London, Paris and Milan. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) recently announced Facebook and Instagram to launch new business functions.

"I don't believe that there will be a sweeping experience in the fashion week," Chen told BoF. "I really believe that Instagram will be its core and soul anyway."

Chen said: the tactical Handbook is carefully built, and different sizes of brands can be used. She also admitted that sometimes the biggest brand in the industry is the least willing to take risks on this platform, even though they already have millions of fans. She also said that the guide is not a prescriptive formula, and brands can choose tools and best practices according to their own methods. Chen said Instagram is also developing new features to make users pay more attention to upcoming fashion week content.

The timing of this move is subtle. A new platform like Tiktok was downloaded more than 11 million times in March 2020, and is growing rapidly. After hiring Derek Blasberg as a fashion and beauty co operative director in 2018, YouTube is investing heavily in the field to attract fashion audiences.

According to eMarketer data, it is estimated that people will spend only 1.5% more time on the Instagram platform in 2020. But now, the research company expects Instagram to get the biggest boost from the epidemic, during which time the US and European people used mobile phones increased by 14%.

"In the past three months, we have seen a dramatic change in the way the fashion industry uses Instagram," Chen said. "Many brands that have never been tried live have suddenly begun to live."

How to make full use of the increasing participation is a challenge. Advertisers are cutting marketing spending to cut costs as consumers stay at home and spend less.

Instagram's parent company Facebook reported that its advertising revenue dropped sharply in March, but said that the market began to recover in April, and advertising revenue was flat compared with the same period last year. The brand also reduces the cost of net red in fashion, luxury and beauty. Many of them have the largest audience on Instagram. According to Launchmetrics, the brand content sticker dropped from 35% in February to 4% in April.

However, as more and more users watch long live videos and live broadcasts on the Instagram platform, the epidemic provides an opportunity for the platform to further integrate into the fashion industry. Last month, its browsing volume increased by 70% over the same period last year. Instagram can not only benefit from capturing more digital advertising market, but also make profits by expanding its application function.

In 2019, Instagram allowed users not to jump to external browsers, but to shop directly through brand posts, and allowed net red and spokesmen to prompt fans to shop. The platform can get a slice of the deal, and the brand can fulfill its sales target.

Chen said: the function is still in the testing stage and is limited to us users, but the company still plans to expand the function. Since then, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is introducing the store within the app store for the brand account. Instagram will also add shopping labels to live videos soon, so that the brand can prompt consumers in the live broadcast process. Instagram will also highlight this purchased product on the label page of the discovery page, just like its planned fashion and beauty shopping account shop.

Fashion brands urgently need to promote sales to consumers directly, but lack of brands that attract people to access technology or marketing capital of their websites can consider using Instagram's social networking tools to directly contact consumers. In China, e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and temple library are carrying traffic and sales for brands.

Instagram's guide encourages brands to use shopping labels to promote sales in their posts and Stories snapshots.

"If you are not buying now, you can still use this high flow time to share shopping postings before and after fashion week," the guide reads: "use shopping labels to make this experience as seamless as possible."

Chen and her team are rolling up their sleeves, hoping to ensure that Instagram is the first choice for the brand digital fashion show. They also encourage designers to connect with each other and join a private Facebook group to update in real time. "Our overall philosophy is: we want to teach you how to use these tools to make you a brand, or as an individual, or as a creator, to feel that you have the right to use Instagram in your own way," Chen said. She also expressed the hope that brands would be more experimental in advancing their Instagram strategy. "At such a time, some of the most creative ideas will emerge." Of course, the epidemic will not completely disappear from the physical fashion show. Fashion week still plays an important role in the whole industry. In addition, digital activities may not be able to replace the magic of traditional shows. The traditional show can strongly gather the entities such as stars, net red and other fashion leaders, so that the machines that the fashion industry dreams of will work and turn the dress into the object of people's desire.

Instagram also does not think this application can replace the physical fashion show. "We don't think that Instagram is a substitute for traditional fashion shows, but we hope to provide a solution for us in this era as much as we can, and we hope this is a good start," the company wrote in its guide.

But when the fashion week comes back, it is unlikely that the big brands will be able to show themselves again. The epidemic will stimulate the brand to explore how and when to display its series of possibilities. At the moment, Instagram's efforts may make the brand form a single place in the world, but most of these suggestions are aimed at consumers rather than industries. Over the next few months, brands must also figure out how to sell products to buyers who can't access Showroom.

The problem of fashion week is far from being solved.