Is Fashion Week Out Of Date In The Age Of Social Media?

In 2015, when Mercedes Benz announced that it would no longer sponsor New York fashion week, Gucci announced that its Milan women's wear show would only host a fashion show instead of holding two costumes for the media and buyers in the past. Fewer and fewer brands will show top clothing in fashion week, instead of more Instagram on the street.

The purpose of fashion week is to serve the traditional department stores, boutiques and other retailers who use wholesaling mode. They ensure that after watching the fashion series in advance, they will reserve enough lead time for the buyers to place orders and designers to fulfill them before they finally enter the store. But with the development of social media, more and more designers choose not to adopt the traditional wholesale mode instead of supporting the consumer strategy. Is fashion week out of date?

In the past few years, people began to feel as if designers had disappeared some of them from the official calendar of fashion week, such as Proenza Schouler or Altuzarra, while others like Rebecca Taylor completely gave up the fashion show. In a world increasingly dominated by social media, fashion week seems to be meaningless for many people.

"We work hard, though the fashion show looks really beautiful, but who is watching the play? Who is the audience of the play? Is it sent to the last seat and the people outside the show? Most of our customers do not go to the website to watch the program. Our customers seldom come to participate in this activity, so we realize that we have missed a great deal of marketing time.

The real moment for Taylor is after her debut in the 2015 spring series.

Fashion designer Misha Nonoo has similar experiences:

If the purpose of the fashion show is to let the audience share the moments of Instagram, why not jump over the intermediate links and directly contact the consumers?

I saw so many editors coming over. They watched the program through the iPhone screen, took photos, and uploaded them to Instagram to share with hundreds of thousands of fans.

Compared with the Fashion Week held in the past, the level of attracting consumers is more desirable every day, and the Internet is a daily performance.

We really like this, not only have we received a good response, but these videos are always there.

It can be seen that social media has been flooded with every aspect of life, making use of its almost transparent timeliness and interaction to enable users to feel the charm of the brand without time difference. Many fashion brands have joined the camp of social media brand marketing, and fashion week mode is being hit by social media.

The penetration of social media into the fashion industry is not limited to foreign countries. In the Chinese consumer market, consumers are also showing strong social characteristics.

Tencent advertising and Boston consulting (BCG) jointly released the "2019 China luxury consumer digital behavior report", which shows that socialization has become the main trend of China's marketing development. Just from Li Jiaqi to Li Ziqi, it shows the characteristics of strong socialization.

More than 80% of Chinese consumers will choose "rational" online research and offline purchase when buying, far higher than the global average. It is worth noting that even when overseas consumption occurs, consumers are greatly influenced by online contacts before buying.

Of all the contacts, social networking and digital media still occupy nearly half of the attention, despite the attraction of creative activities such as brand line exhibitions and flash shops. Among them, the WeChat ecosystem is the most social platform for consumers to discover and study, followed by micro-blog and Xiao Hong.

The core channel affecting the purchase decision of Chinese luxury consumers is changing to a highly digitized direction, with social media penetration reaching 67%. Luxury brands can reach users better through social networking platform, and attract customized customers to attract and influence the purchase decisions of the younger generation of core consumers.

However, in the face of the characteristics of social media, brand should not be simply promoted. This platform can be used to better understand customer needs, such as the number of fans, types, interests, lifestyles and so on displayed in micro-blog and WeChat, so as to make precise positioning for potential customers, carry out timely and effective activities to further attract new fans, enhance the brand's reputation and reputation, so as to achieve a virtuous cycle of promotion.

But despite the obvious need for change in fashion week, outdated questions remain uninterrupted. But the fact is that fashion week is so annoying to designers that only a few grand scenes a year offer them an invaluable opportunity to show their vision, instead of sending a design that is full of painstaking care to the shop.

At the same time, we should pay more attention to the fact that more and more clothing brands have grasped this mechanism in a timely manner to win their own banner, and have achieved satisfactory results. However, if we want to step by step in the game of market turbulence, we still need the brand to constantly export new product innovation and marketing innovation.