Fashion Digital Cognoscenti Buck The Industry

What role does social influence play in anointing the "new fashion icon?"  Is reality TV-esque fashion-hacking the new social media prerogative? What's fashion disruption, anyway? Can a designer do it all with influencer minions? Does fashion aspiration alone translate into sales? The notion of the celebrity social influencer-driven fashion label was a recurrent thread lining last week's packed Fashion Digital conference in New York City, a mash-up of fashion, lifestyle and technology cognoscenti.

Enter the intrepid Fashion Digital Intelligentsia.

Confident agents of disruption, they are challenging the threadbare constraints of traditional fashion creation, marketing, ecommerce and supply chain. Rule-breakers all: fashion marketing disrupters like Catherine Sadler of Sadler & Brand–the innovator behind the Banana Republic/AMC Mad Men iconic capsule collection, which she also took mile-high aboard Virgin America for an in-flight runway show–and iJustine's eyecasting, Twitter-stretching red carpet highjacking at the Academy Awards, as well as many others, prove this.

Suggesting the fashion industry is outmoded and overdue for radical alteration, former Parsons director Simon Collins called for a "blow it up" approach to disruption. Consultants and marketers on his panel, citing the shortcomings of mobile payment platforms as a major impediment to ecommerce growth, also echoed the imperative for an outlier entrepreneurial approach to skirt distribution and supply chain issues.

How to stand out in the increasingly saturated fashion cloud? "Give the brand what they need rather than what they say they want," (Tony King, King & Partners). "Meet customization aspiration," (Gemma Sole, Nineteenth Amendment.)  "Obsessing with details," (Ryan Slyper, Kenneth Cole Productions.)

Fern Mallis, founder of New York Fashion Week and an industry icon herself, has seen radical change since social media advanced to democratize fashion.  "We must learn to speak a new language, write new code," she remarked, noting that brands are now driven by the fashion digital cognoscenti, breaking the mold and reshaping the industry.

Teddy Tinson, from IMG Models and Interview magazine, said his agency held a monthly social media boot camp and models handle their own social media. Today's agency advises models on how to develop a unique social media identity and establish their own digital footprint.  When negotiating contracts on behalf of their models, the agency leverages the pack mentality of young social native models, driving home to brands the value of their exponentially growing influencer status. 

Cameron Silver, from H by Halston and Decades, addressed the challenge of ubiquitous luxury for brands, noting the ubiquity of brands like Birkin has cooled, perhaps fallout of the "Kardashian syndrome," he noted. But how do you retain the "cool" factor? Luxury brands face the conundrum of managing the "exclusivity" expectation of high-end luxury clientele, while expanding brand relevancy in social media.  Noting the "shift in luxury brand DNA," Silver identified the hunger of today's customer for learning, and the "expectation to learn brand legacy."

Other examples of fashion's game-changing digital strategies cited during the three-day Fashion Digital conference included Mischa Nonoo's Front Row Instagram-only NYFW show. Nonoo's testing the limits and skipping fashion week for an Instagram-only show is a very modern breaking the pattern of what's becoming a diluted property.

Increasingly, fashion brands are hiring digital agencies like Swell Labs/Tn'T to update relevancy and meet customer expectations. Tarak Malak cited several others, including @OscarPRgirl, who has effectively reversed the staid image of Oscar de la Renta ("not your Park Ave. lady"), and entered the market for a younger luxury clientele. Malak's agency was also responsible for the Valentino Zoolander 2 gorilla runway fashion week stunt. Social media bait to be sure.

Other successful digital fashion feats presented during the conference included Burberry Kisses interactive website; Nike Sports reality feature; MCM interactive film experience; Hermes gamification; and a Kenzo immersive 3D microsite, "No Fish/No Nothing (Blue Marine Foundation)."

Indisputably, Fashion Digital is to be applauded for assembling a rich spectrum of the evolving fashion tech world. CEO Sandy Hussain is stitching together a safety net for design and tech disrupters alike, branding globally to surface tensions and innovate solutions through creative partnerships.

Yet multiple strategic challenges still persist, as discussed in a CTO-CMO ecommerce mash-up, led by Danielle Savin of Lyons Consulting Group. Still defying cohesive strategies are such critical undertakings as influencer attraction and celebrity collaborations. Digital has a voracious appetite for fresh content and shoots are expensive. Ongoing promotions must be produced at the speed of social, requiring dexterity and speed.

Since content inventory must be constantly refreshed, tracking new online offers in real time is a huge boon and reassurance to a designer.  Perils of outsourcing one's brand were also cited, especially given the non-uniformity of platforms when vendors switch.  Solutions are still perplexing, and engagement and attribution models are needed to support marketing ROI.

A salient luxury example (not discussed during Fashion Digital), Balmain has been leading the flock when it comes to bucking the system. With stealth couturier legerdemain, fashion Insta-meister and Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing has hacked the art of pushing the social media needle. 

His creativity notwithstanding, luxury house innovation hacker Rousteing—a couture outlier and virtual unknown until five years ago—can arguably be credited with leading the hidebound couture industry into the 21st century.

After all, how can you argue with 25% growth since Rousteing took the reins of a pedigree brand in 2011, which had only five years earlier emerged from bankruptcy and near oblivion.

Hands down Rousteing won the Instagram contest among top designers at Paris Fashion Week in October for collection posts. But now, topping his own record—and probably that of other luxury designers who over the past decade have entered the fray of fast fashion collaboration capsule collections (the stuff of another analysis)— the reality TV caliber anticipation buzzing the imminent launch (Nov. 5) of his H&M X Balmain collab is likely to tip the scale.

Just how far has Balmain pushed the needle and tightened the thread around the competition? To get an idea, I analyzed four edgy designers, each of whom recently showed during Fashion Month, over the past two months—two in New York, two in Paris. 

As the NetBase analysis below shows, while Marc Jacobs (32%) may have a slim lead over Balmain (30%) in share of overall mentions among the four designers, indicative of Balmain's social influence can be seen in the 4.5 trillion potential impressions stoked by the Balmain Army incursion.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the two-month analysis included last week's H&M X Balmain NYC launch party, a major social media event.)

While the Balmaniacs may be at the top of their game for now, fashion industry tensions are peaking as more designers speak out about the human toll implicit in corporate pressures to create a collection every month, or close to it, if you're also tending to your own eponymous label. 

Unlike their predecessors, in this heyday of social media today's designers are expected to be not only the creative force behind a label, and create numerous original apparel and accessory lines, but also, as celebrity magnets and social gadflies, to be constantly stoking corporate's marketing engines.  Designers are in effect expected to don the mantle of social influencer strategist, content creator, community brand manager, and the list keeps growing.

With these pressures, creative director shuffling is becoming de rigueur. Raf Simmons recent sudden resignation as Dior's creative director, after only 3 years, is symptomatic of a troubled system.  Foreshadowing a bleak future for overburdened designers, Alber Elbaz, Lanvin creative director, used the opportunity of an award acceptance speech from Fashion International Group to decry the relentless pace of fashion.

The runway just got more slippery. 

View the original article here

Original source: Fashion Digital Cognoscenti Buck The Industry.
http://www.jretechnology.com