London Fashion Week steals the show
One of the most exciting times for fashionistas has come and gone for yet another year. Yes, you guessed it, ‘Fashion Week’- where top fashion designers from all over the world showcase their spring/summer collections for the following year. The events were attended by exclusive A-listers and top high flying brands. Through the use of social media, the rest of the world have been allowed that little extra peek at what goes on behind the scenes.
As you may have read in the Evening Standard today, we’ve used Brandwatch to look at how engaged social media users were. How many conversations were generated about the designers and their collections, how many were about the front row, and most importantly, who actually made the cut?
Here is our low-down of what people were talking about on social at the events:
New York Fashion Week (NYFW)
Alexander Wang was the brand that had the best Twitter performance, being mentioned in 7,664 throughout the week, overtaking all competitors. The catwalk show itself generated 4,461 tweets, with high profile celebrities such as The Weeknd, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj in attendance.
The hashtag #WANG10 was used throughout social media, with the brand encouraging the social community to watch the show on their website, and documenting the celebrities in attendance on Instagram, with two posts receiving an impressive 77.9k combined likes. Gigi Hadid, Kylie, Kendall Jenner and Brooklyn Beckham were some of the most tweeted buzzwords coming out of the NYFW conversations. Yet, the best performing tweet of NYFW was posted by @CalvinKlein featuring Kendall Jenner backstage, which achieved 1.2k retweets and 3.5k favourites.
In the run up to NYFW, there were a lot of reports in the press about innovations going on during the event, but these didn’t seem to have an impact on social conversation, apart from Periscope. The app generated 8,034 mentions, and also had a steady presence throughout, with fashion shows being broadcast from brands such as Rebecca Minkoff, Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren.
Joie de vivre at the #RLRunway Spring 2016 show. Watch the full livestream on @Periscopeco: https://t.co/it5Z2Xzkj2 https://t.co/rTYkDphorp — Ralph Lauren (@RalphLauren) September 17, 2015
However, the best performing brand, Alexander Wang, accounted for just 0.45% of overall NYFW conversation. Perhaps this shows that, in line with today’s celeb obsessed culture, it’s the people in the front row that are pulling in the eyeballs, rather than the big brands on the catwalk.
London Fashion Week (LFW)
LFW was more positive for brands on social overall. Burberry came the closest to making a splash on social, accounting for 1.8% of all LFW tweets, over 7 times more than the second highest performing competitor, Topshop Unique.
Burberry’s success on social was across various platforms such as Snapchat, with its ‘Burberry Snapchat show,’ in order to exclusively unveil their latest range prior to their catwalk show.
The #Burberry hashtag was the third most used throughout conversations, and the brand also provided the top tweet throughout the week; the runway picture of ‘The cut out ankle boot with The Belt Bag’, which achieved just over 2.5k retweets, and 6.3k favourites.
The cut-out ankle boot paired with The Belt Bag on the tiled @Burberry runway #LFW pic.twitter.com/LHgoQ170hJ — Burberry (@Burberry) September 21, 2015
There were around 7k posts about LFW on Instagram during the week, mostly from ‘regrammed’ images of catwalks. And several brands used Periscope to offer exclusive content to consumers, such as River Island, Vivienne Westwood, and Hunter Boots, showing that more brands were becoming increasingly innovative with their social content.
How did they stack up?
Overall, LFW created more buzz on social media platforms than NYFW, with 2.5m tweets, compared to the 1.6m for NYFW.
Amongst brands, again LFW came out top, with Burberry the clear winner reaching 46,718 mentions, compared to the top mentioned brand during NYFW, Alexander Wang, with 7,664.
Burberry’s social strategy went from strength to strength, outperforming others by a significant margin. Through using their influential social channels, and Snapchat in particular, Burberry managed to stay relevant amongst all the noise. For both events however, it was the the high-profile attendees rather than the fashion collections that dominated the main conversations on social.
Brands showcasing their collections at future New York events will have to up their social game, and take notes from Burberry in how to generate huge engagement by mixing up content across social platforms.