Hot or Not: Social Hits and Misses from London Fashion Week

louise.stapley

In case you hadn’t noticed, February saw London play host to an army of stiletto-wearing, smartphone-wielding fashionistas for Fashion Week. From live-streamed catwalk shows to FROW selfies, social media has been shaking up the fashion industry for some years now, as designers compete to win relevance with the much-coveted Gen-Z customer.

Here’s who was oh-so now and who missed the mark on this year’s social catwalk.

MODEL BEHAVIOUR

Topshop made live-streaming glossy
Pioneered by Burberry and Topshop, live-streaming catwalk shows has become standard procedure at fashion week. Always one to lead the pack, Topshop raised the bar this year by saying “nu-uh” to grainy, amateur footage and appointing photographer Nick Knight to bring some panache to the practice, in the form of a Periscope stream and Instagram vignettes capturing the models fresh from the catwalk.




@alannaarrington #topshopuniquexnickknight #showstudio #lfw #topshopunique @showstudio @nick_knight


A video posted by Topshop (@topshop) on Feb 21, 2016 at 7:57am PST




Lyst made us LOL
By making fashion week accessible to a wider audience, social media has taken some of the stuffiness out of the industry, creating a space for a sense of humour. In a brave move, Lyst adopted the ‘Confused Travolta’ meme for a tongue-in-cheek angle on covering the event.

With this, on top of last year’s Zoolander takeover on the Valentino catwalk, perhaps we can expect to see the occasional flicker of a smile on even the most severe of fashion editors’ faces in future (we’re looking at you, Anna Wintour).

Smart social thinking from Burberry
Can this brand do no wrong? Burberry may not have wowed us with the social catwalk innovations of previous shows, but social insights remain at the heart of their brand strategy. They’ve identified a “see it, want it, buy it” attitude in their customers and adapted their business to cater for it. Instead of having to wait six months to buy what they’ve seen on the catwalk, Burberry customers will now be able to shop straight from the runway. Social campaigns remain a focus for the brand, who have invested a whopping 60% of their marketing budget into digital.

SO LAST-SEASON

Very.co.uk and LG wanted to #SaveOurStyle
In the latest random tech-and-fashion-brand collaboration, LG and Very.co.uk teamed up to save LFW attendees from wardrobe malfunctions. Tweet #SaveOurStyle and they’d deploy a crack-team of steamers and stitchers to attend to your outfit (provided you were in the W1 area). It was a nice idea, but something was lacking in the execution and the hashtag received fewer than 110 mentions during the course of London Fashion Week, a sizable chunk of which came from @LGUK themselves.

Mulberry changed tack (sort of)
After a notable absence from the Fashion Week schedule since 2013, all eyes were on Mulberry’s new creative director Johnny Coca as he dropped his debut collection for the brand. Despite teasing a new logo and creative direction on Instagram, an opportunity for social storytelling during the show itself was overlooked. If they’re hoping to feel more relevant to Gen-Z, they’ll need to take a leaf out of Burberry’s book.



“It’s quite an honour – to be trusted with this brand that people love so much, that people feel is very much part of their lives. And I’m not even British!” #JohnnyCoca #MulberryEngland


A video posted by Mulberry (@mulberryengland) on Feb 14, 2016 at 11:20pm PST




From shoppable runways to seasonless collections, social media is changing the face of the fashion industry, one fashion week at a time. But in spite of all their efforts, there’s still one question they simply can’t seem to answer, as Google highlighted: What on earth are we supposed to wear?