Robert Duffy and Marc Jacobs | Source: Twitpic via @robertcduffy

In our latest CEO Talk, Robert Duffy, longtime business partner of Marc Jacobs, speaks to BoF about the power of Twitter.

NEW YORK, United States — When Robert Duffy posted his first-ever Tweet on 30 January, saying “Welcome Tweeties,” he had no idea what he was getting into. What happened in the weeks that followed is an excellent lesson for fashion executives everywhere: the best way to understand social media is to use social media.

You see, Robert Duffy had never used Twitter before. In fact, he didn’t really even know what Twitter was until a member of his team introduced it to him. Eventually, he warmed to the idea of using Twitter to share the behind-the-scenes action of the Marc Jacobs show, still the highlight of New York Fashion Week even after 26 years in business.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. On his second day of tweeting, Duffy accidentally deleted all of his tweets. In the days that followed, he learned about direct messaging and retweeting and privacy on Twitter. Still, Duffy stuck with it. He began each day by getting on his stationary bicycle and reading the hundreds of tweets that had come in over night, listening and responding to feedback and questions on stores, customer service, the Marc Jacobs website, and — music to our BoF ears — how to run a fashion business.

Soon, Robert became an expert tweeter, not only on the techniques and norms of using Twitter, but also by speaking authentically in his own voice and even sharing a few private moments with Marc Jacobs himself. This authenticity resonated across the fashion Twittersphere in thousands and thousands of retweets, and spreading to blog posts and articles in the mainstream media.

By February 13, the power of Twitter had really dawned on Duffy: “I have learned much from doing this,” he tweeted. “Am really better for the experiance [sic]. You talk to the whole world in 1 second. Takes no time. Amazing!”

Still, he announced to his almost 7,000 followers that he would be hanging up his Twitter hat. And yesterday, after the Marc by Marc Jacobs show, his @robertcduffy handle was transformed into @MJInternational, leaving room for an as-yet unnamed someone else to fill Duffy’s shoes.

In a very special exclusive CEO Talk for The Business of Fashion, I caught up with Robert Duffy backstage before the Marc by Marc show, armed with questions from our loyal BoF followers, to learn more about his Twitter experience.

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Robert Duffy | Source: Style.com

The Future Of Fashion, Part One: Robert Duffy (Style.com)
“That unflappability has presumably served Duffy well over the last two and a half decades, as he and Jacobs have gone from being the self-described “rebels” of American fashion to becoming the leaders of a global mega-brand. During our conversation… he talked about his experiences with tweeting and live streaming.”

Rewarding Men With a Store of Their Own (WSJ)
“High-end fashion has long catered to women more than men. Hermès and Coach are the latest fashion houses making new efforts to shrink the gender gap.”

New York Fashion Week Gets Techy (WSJ)
“New York fashion week officially kicks off Thursday morning, in what will assuredly be the most open-and-available shows to the public ever. No, that doesn’t mean just anyone can walk into the tents… But if you’ve got an Internet connection, you can do the next best thing: watch a live-stream of the show online. Fashion has finally gotten technology.”

Fashion’s Online Numbers Game: Faking an Audience (Signature 9)
“Despite a straightforward statement to the contrary, wildly inflated numbers about fashion blogs and websites abound. Sometimes the numbers come from the bloggers and websites themselves – with no verification, other times they’re seemingly pulled from thin air.”

Who Sits Where at Fashion Week and Why (Vanity Fair)
“While everyone knows that front-row seats are reserved for celebrities, V.I.P.’s, and important editors, very little is known about the strategic process that goes into filling the chairs where everyone else sits.”

Penelope Cruz Bafta 2009 Red Carpet | Source: Bafta

London fashion week meets the Baftas (Guardian)
“It’s a brilliant idea to combine the drama of the Baftas with the catwalk glamour of London fashion week. It’s just amazing no one thought of it before.”

Stores Reach Into Bag of Tactics As Luxury-Goods Sales Improve (WSJ)
“Optimism is creeping back into style, following three seasons of budget slashing, according to luxury-retail executives who will attend New York Fashion Week… Even so, there’s a focus on luring back ‘aspirational shoppers.’”

Hermès CEO sees higher taxes hitting luxury (Reuters)
“Governments worldwide will have little choice but to raise taxes on the rich to address ballooning deficits, a development that would harm luxury spending in the coming years, French luxury chain Hermès International chief executive, Patrick Thomas, said.”

Marc Jacobs Sues Christian Audigier (NY Magazine)
“Marc Jacobs is suing Christian Audigier for trade-dress and trademark infringement over a handbag that’s suspiciously similar to one he designed… Audigier’s bag is ‘confusingly similar’ to Jacobs’s, according to the suit.”

The Indian shopper’s chaos theory (Live Mint)
“Taking the Indian shopper out of chaos is like taking a fish out of water. We feel at home in the hustle bustle of local markets and start having withdrawal symptoms in a structured sterile atmosphere.”

Kate Moss for Longchamps | Source: Longchamps

Kate Moss: Bags of Style (IHT)
“‘I am not doing it for different personalities — it’s what I like,’ says Ms. Moss — or Kate, as she is known. At age 36, she has taken another step in her second life, as a designer rather than as a supermodel using her pretty face and sensual lips to promote other brands.”

Esprit 1st-Half Net Profit Down 5.2 percent; Beats Forecasts (WSJ)
“Fashion retailer Esprit Holdings Ltd. said Wednesday its first-half net profit fell 5.2% percent from a year earlier as a disappointing wholesale business offset the improvement in its core retail operations.”

Abercrombie & Fitch’s Style Sense Wears Thin With Some Shoppers (WSJ)
“Retail analysts said Abercrombie’s troubles go beyond pricing to its once unerring sense of style, a problem that could be trickier to fix. The logo T-shirt and torn jeans ensemble that Abercrombie made the unofficial school uniform a decade ago has played out.”

Marc Jacobs to Stream Show Live While Robert Duffy Hypes It via Twitter (NY Magazine)
“Further democratizing the Fashion Week process, Jacobs’s business partner Robert Duffy just started tweeting to document Marc’s progress on the collection.”

Luxury in 2010 (CNN)
“Is there a luxury hotlist for 2010? CNN’s Ayesha Durgahee reports.”

Multi-colour shoes, Gucci Autumn/Winter 2009 | Source: Gucci.

Shoes, bags prove staying power in luxury crisis (Reuters)
“At the height of the luxury goods boom, launching a single successful “it” bag was enough to substantially alter a company’s profit outlook. Over the past week at the Paris fashion shows, buyers, designers and executives were hoping the same kind of accessories magic would help luxury firms weather the economic downturn.”

World’s fashion weeks leave audiences all a-twitter (Guardian)
“This was the season that the fashion industry embraced technology in all its forms. With many criticising the biannual shows – and the ensuing air miles – as archaic and environmentally unsound, designers explored new ways to reach the masses.”

Designers give essential items a twist (FT)
“Last month Marc Jacobs launched a “stimulus package” of “essential” styles as part of “Don’t Miss the Marc” in his Marc by Marc Jacobs line (from £40 to £180); Rei Kawakubo’s Black collection reprises past favourites; and Alexander Wang, Doo-Ri Chung, Jason Wu, Jasmin Shokrian and Camilla Staerk have all launched simplified secondary lines. Basics, in high fashion form, are back.”

A triumph of style over economic slump (Times)
“Lauded at Fashion Week, designers Jenny Packham and Eugene Lin took the plunge and launched collections in recessions.”

Louis Vuitton Will Open Stores in Lebanon, Mongolia This Year (Bloomberg)
“Louis Vuitton, a brand of the largest luxury goods maker LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, will open its first store in Lebanon and one in Mongolia this year, the brand’s chief executive officer said.”

Jil Sander and Tadashi Yanai, courtesy of AFP

Jil Sander to join Uniqlo (Drapers)
Jil Sander is set to become a design consultant at Uniqlo, “which will see her take overall creative control of the value fashion chain’s womenswear and menswear ranges.”

Delhi gears up for two fashion ‘weeks’ (India PRwire)
“Term it excess in times of a global economic slump, but two parallel events – the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) and the Delhi Fashion Week (DFW) – are again set for a head-to-head clash for their autumn/winter editions later this week.”

The duck that laid the golden egg (IHT)
According to the International Herald Tribune, the Moncler down jacket has come down from the mountains and landed on the city streets and fashionable society.

CFDA Announces Nominees for 2009 Awards (CFDA)
Marc Jacobs and Narciso Rodriguez are among the nominees for the CFDA Awards.

Escada Losses Widen in Quarter (WWD)
“Tough times continue at Escada. Against a backdrop of ongoing restructuring and a weakened luxury market, Escada’s earnings and sales further tumbled in the first quarter…” (Subscription required)

Backstage tweet from Marc Jacobs show, courtesy of The Moment

NEW YORK, United States — As another fashion week season comes to a close, we’ve seen everything from intergalactic armour to a full-fledged ’80s revival on the runways. But when it comes to covering and commenting on the collections, one trend stands out. This time around, we came closer than ever to capturing and transmitting the real experience and energy of the shows thanks to fashion’s growing love affair with Twitter.

Editors at New York Times fashion blog The Moment, Women’s Wear Daily, SHOWstudio and our very own The Business of Fashion, among others, took to the “micro-blogging” service with enthusiasm, using their iPhones, BlackBerrys and laptops to broadcast haiku-length updates on what they were doing and thinking at presentations and parties from New York to Paris. For fellow insiders and fashion consumers following their  “tweets” this amounted to a captivating play-by-play delivered with immediacy and intimacy like never before.

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Yohji Yamamoto, Pied Piper of New York Fashion Week

NEW YORK, United States — New York Fashion Week is always a blur of meetings, shows and parties, and this week is no exception. But there is also something different in the air for Autumn/Winter 2009 — a palpable sense that some serious change is coming, and in some quarters, the slightest hint of optimism that we may be reaching a market bottom.

On Monday evening, Marc Jacobs scaled back his show significantly: there was no major set, almost no celebrities, and 1000 fewer guests than normal, which is a dramatic reversal from his show at the height of the economic boom in September 2007. The focus, instead, was on the clothes which were an explosion of colour compressed into 8 minutes of fantastic, over-the-top 80’s punk and high, shellacked hairdos.

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A little lightness to end the week here on The Business of Fashion. This 1930’s clip from Youtube forecasts cantilever-heeled shoes and transparent net as the fashion must-haves for the Year 2000. The video has had almost 100,000 views. Could Raf Simons, Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen been some of them? Have a look at their collections for Spring/Summer 2008.

The Latest in Fashion: Pink Slips (New York Times)
Eric Wilson chronicles the revolving designer doors at fashion houses from New York to Milan to Paris in recent years. Of course, the latest door revolved this week in Milan, where Lars Nilsson was quickly replaced by Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi of 6267 as head designers for Gianfranco Ferre.

Luxe brands Follow the Money – to the Internet (WWD)
Several readers have written to alert us to today’s WWD article about the role the Internet can play in helping luxe brands ride out the recession, which US Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, all but confirmed yesterday. In what some are touting as the greatest recession buster for luxury companies, the Internet may (finally) be the next battleground in their quest for the luxury consumer’s dollars, euro and yen.

In what is what is likely a first in the fashion industry when it comes to the blogosphere, Marc Jacobs has joined the ongoing online debate raging about his supposed row with Suzy Menkes, the highly regarded fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune.

In his comment on Cathy Horyn’s On the Runway blog, Jacobs says:

I did NOT stick my tongue out at Suzy Menkes……I pulled a stupid face with my tongue out in happiness for being done with what has been a great but most stressful season for me. I am not stupid, childish or a vindictive person….I had prior to the show left a silly t-shirt and a nice note for Suzy on her seat. Why would I do anything to further upset her? Right after a show!!?? Cathy and all else reading this, I am surprised that anyone who knows me at all think that I am that petty or stupid! Anyone who has ever been on a stage would know you can’t actually see the audience. I made a face at no one in particular….I didn’t have a clue as to who was sitting there. Come on guys, give me a break!!!!!

Jacobs’ decision to respond to the backlash in a public forum, as opposed to using the normal channels of publicists and press releases, was a smart one. You can only respond to the blogosphere by going straight to the heart of the storm and engaging the community. Marc Jacobs’ choice to do this on Horyn’s blog also shows how On the Runway has become a formidable community with its own voice in the industry.   And the response from the community has generally been very positive.

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