A Ticket into the Exclusive Fashion World

By Romey Louangvilay, Monday, September 13, 2010, at 6:36 pm.

After bar crawling with a few Euro RSCG Worldwide PR colleagues during Fashion’s Night Out, it was hard not to compare today’s fashion industry with the way it used to be. Even though I’m fairly young and a novice in this industry, changes are noticeable.

It was about six years ago when I first learned that fashion is more than just shopping in the mall for clothes. It is an entire industry that employs thousands of people—people who help decide what is in and what is out.

I was interning my freshman year at Elite Model Management in Atlanta, now called Factor Women. During that time, fashion events, such as Fashion Week, were very exclusive. People knew about the events, but no one could gain entry unless your name was on the list (usually compiled by us PR people). And the only way non-fashion people knew what happened was through newspaper and magazine fashion and gossip columns.

As an intern with Elite, I mailed invites and followed up with phone calls to confirm RSVPs. We never really promoted anything publicly. Now, events and things that happen during them are more well-known, and people find out about what happened almost immediately. Why? Two words: social media.

Last year, Forbes.com described exclusivity in the fashion world as a way for the industry to maintain its prestige and importance. Specifically, the article says: “Image is everything to luxury fashion companies. Preserving prestige is what sets brands such as Gucci and Hermès apart from Gap and H&M. But that same elitism is keeping certain luxury brands from engaging in social media, one of the most powerful forms of marketing at the moment.”

Fashion’s Night Out is one instance of where social media is taking fashion to the masses. Though a public event, it helped people in cities where FNO wasn’t available to see how fashionistas like to party. Several people Foursquared their arrival and tweeted what they saw at some of the events they attended—and probably used some of the fashion apps and maps that Mashable highlighted to help people decide which events to attend.

While I was at the Teen Vogue event, several people tweeted like traditional journalists. This event, as well as others during Fashion’s Night Out, opened Twitterville to what Media Caffeine describes as the Twitter Personalities. Below are some of the Twitter Personalities I encountered at the Teen Vogue event:

The Purist. This person continues tweeting indefinitely, following Twitter’s original intent to “microblog every aspect of their life, whether exciting or mundane,” says Media Caffeine. During the event, I saw tweets from one person every other minute that documented everything, from his arrival and stepping in a pothole to shaking hands with new people and leaving the event.
The Clever Purist. The only difference between this person and the Purist is that the Clever Purist will “put a spin on their tweets to make their actions more entertaining or interesting than they really are.” These users can get a strong following, says Media Caffeine, because they’re seen as adding value to the stream. During Fashion’s Night Out, one tweeter actually tweeted every 60 seconds, but the messages were kind of entertaining. She tweeted about the outfits she thought were weird and even tweeted about seeing Shenae Grimes of “90210.” I’m not too familiar with the cast, so it was interesting to learn that a celebrity was only a few feet away from me.
The Tastemaker. This personality has “found three major avenues of using their influence to make changes, send traffic and often even make the news.” The Teen Vogue Fashion’s Night Out event brought out the blogger in everyone; one tweet from an attendee always ended with a link to her blog. She definitely wanted to be known as a tastemaker.

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week even has Facebook and Twitter profiles that offer people up-close-and-personal photos of designers and people at events. Live-streaming tweets allow others to feel as if they are at the event.

Although the exclusive inner fashion circle will probably never be penetrated fully by outsiders, and non-fashion veterans probably won’t ever see the inside of a fashion show or get up close with their favorite high-end designer, social media lets others see what’s happening during such events. It’s a move in the right direction.

Photo Credit: creativecommons.org/by Art Comments

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