The Business of Fashion
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
BERLIN, Germany — A big thank you to PREMIUM and Mary Scherpe of Stil in Berlin for inviting me to join an esteemed panel of German fashion experts — Christoph Amend of Zeit Magazin, Marcus Luft of Gala and Too Posh to Push, and Sven Schoene of PR Agency K-MB — to discuss the future of fashion media on the first day of Berlin Fashion Week.
The panel began with the esteemed Suzy Menkes, who wasn't able to participate in person, but declared via video: "The world changed when fashion instead of being a monologue, became a conversation. And that's never going to stop."
Suzy, of course, was amongst the first of the mainstream fashion editors to reach out to bloggers and engage them as professionals. "A good blogger," she says, "can really take all sorts of elements and use them both in words and pictures and make a strong statement."
She's "tremendously in favour of anything that is new and fresh in fashion," but the one thing that concerns her is that "some bloggers believe, in their innocence, that they are completely independent in what they say." In between the lines, Suzy advises bloggers to be wary of the increasing pressure they receive from brands to evangelise brands and products.
The video also features Julia and Jessie from Les Mads, Jennine from The Coveted and Yvan from The Facehunter, each of whom provide their own perspectives on how quickly the fashion blogosphere is rising in influence and prevalence.
Brands are using them for design tasks, in their marketing, on their e-commerce sites and in augmented-reality experiences such as virtual try-on, with more applications still emerging.
Brands including LVMH’s Fred, TAG Heuer and Prada, whose lab-grown diamond supplier Snow speaks for the first time, have all unveiled products with man-made stones as they look to technology for new creative possibilities.
Social networks are being blamed for the worrying decline in young people’s mental health. Brands may not think about the matter much, but they’re part of the content stream that keeps them hooked.
After the bag initially proved popular with Gen-Z consumers, the brand used a mix of hard numbers and qualitative data – including “shopalongs” with young customers – to make the most of its accessory’s viral moment.