Hello and welcome to the 27th issue of moderated, a newsletter created to dive into insights and phenomenons in the Fashion Industry. It also has a curation and summary of the most talked last week’s events of the industry, offering further readings for more details.
If you are new here, welcome! I hope I can somehow help you to keep up with the fast-paced Fashion Industry.
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In this week’s moderated, I dived into the world of social media to understand why Instagram became the go-to fashion platform and how other players are coming for its crown.
But before jumping into the main article, check the last week’s recap of the Fashion Industry.
Last Week’s Recap
October Became The Second Fashion Month
After a busy fashion month that started in New York at the beginning of September and ended in Paris in early October, we are having a second wave of shows. Covid-19 affected not only the fashion production of some houses that couldn’t prepare collections on time for the traditional fashion month, but it also raised some questions about the traditional fashion calendar. The result was many brands leaving the usual fashion dates and presenting collections on their own timings. Thus, October became a second fashion month with many collections being released. So far, the second fashion month already had the release of collections from Michael Kors, Stella McCartney, Tory Burch, Amiri, Comme des Garçons, Noir Kei Ninomiya, and is still having Raf Simons. Other brands such as Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Celine will show their collections later this year.
The question is: will this new messy calendar be the norm from now on, or is it just a temporary thing due to the pandemic?
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LVMH Fashion Division Returns to Double Digits Growth
Despite the pandemic, LVMH is bouncing back. After a 38% drop in sales year-over-year in the first semester of 2020, the French conglomerate had an impressive recovery at its Q3 results. Revenues were only 7% down mostly thanks to its fashion division, which grew 12%. LVMH does not breakdown results by brands, but it did state that the positive performance was mostly due to its main brands Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. China’s rebound is definitely another factor that contributed to the company’s results, with a Q3 sales growth of 13% in Asia.
To check LVMH Q3 results for yourself click here.
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Zalando Acquires Body Scanning Start-Up
Last week, German fashion e-tailer Zalando announced the acquisition of a body scanning company. The purchase is an attempt from Zalando to solve the largest issue of e-commerce: knowing if the clothes will fit. The Zurich-based software company called Fision created a body scanning app that includes a virtual fitting room, allowing buyers to easily judge whether a garment is in the right size for them. Stacia Carr, Zalando’s Director of Engineering - Size and Fit, explained the main purposes behind this tool:
“Customers will get size advice earlier in their relationship with Zalando. At the same time, we can create a feedback loop between brands and consumers designed to drive customer loyalty and in the long run reduce waste.”
Rating La Mode - Dior and I
This week’s recommendation is a fashion documentary called Dior and I. So, Raf Simons is probably one of my favourite designers alive and this documentary basically shows a bit of his debut as artistic director of Christian Dior, which he left after a brief period in 2015. The documentary, which was directed by Frédéric Tcheng, shows the backstage of creating an haute couture fashion show for one of the largest luxury fashion houses in the world. I remember casually watching this documentary with my mom and falling in love with it.
Click here to check all the platforms where the movie is available (it can change depending on where in the world you are).
Is Instagram’s Fashion Supremacy In Danger?
I always followed a lot of influencers and fashion brands on Instagram and I would usually say the reason was that I had to be up-to-date with the fashion industry. Instagram has been for years the go-to digital platform for fashion brands and influencers. For the last decade or so, Instagram had the indisputable supremacy as the social media for fashion. However, the Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences may have shaken the scenario and other platforms are coming for Instagram’s crown.
TikTok just launched its own fashion month with brands such as Saint Laurent joining it, Burberry hosted its show on the live stream platform Twitch, and most fashion shows this season are being uploaded to Youtube. Will Instagram be able to keep its position as the main social media for the fashion industry? We don’t know, but we can try to analyse the scenario to guess it.
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How Instagram Became the Go-to Social Media for Fashion
There are a lot of reasons for that, and some even created by Instagram with the purpose of appealing to the fashion industry, once the company identified its potential. But there is a very simple and right-on-our-face reason why Instagram became so successful in the fashion field. Think about a fashion magazine, how it is structured: the editorials, full of images, just the right amount of text, and advertisements that look like part of the editorials. Now think about Instagram. Isn’t it kind of the same? The language of primary using images and building editorial-like profiles is what Instagram is all about - and this format works in fashion since magazines became a thing.
Now the second obvious reason, Instagram is millennials’ social media and millennials are the main consumer generation of fashion – for now. Until 2017, 90% of Instagram’s user base was made of people under 35 years old. The social media platform had a sense of community that millennials like and brands understood that. They also understood the personification of advertising, with the rise of celebrities and influencers on the social platform. Soon, even models had to be big on Instagram to be successful in the fashion industry.
Eventually, Instagram identified the potential to maintain and increase its influence on the fashion industry. For example, it created features that made the platform even friendlier to fashion consumers. Some of these features were the “shop” button, allowing impatient millennials to buy products right away, and live features, which fashion brands used to show the backstage of the industry. Chanel, for example, already stated that Instagram is extremely important to connect with its consumers. The French luxury house is the most followed luxury fashion brand on Instagram as of now, with 41,5 million followers. Andi Bei, Eleonore Bichot, Henrik Johansen, Livia Lima, Mateusz Majka, and Max Dante wrote in their paper about Chanel's Instagram strategy:
“Intimacy is the keyword in our analysis as Chanel has become a leader in the field of communicating with millennials and targeting what they want to see (…) The world of Chanel is opening to followers, whether it is through live casual conversations between two brand ambassadors, pictures of a launch party or backstage images of shows. This does not exclude product pictures or official campaign extracts: everything is brought together to convey the brand’s philosophy in the most direct way, and is also very efficient in modernising the brand’s image as well as reaching a young target audience”
Another example is Gucci, which is just 200 thousand followers behind Chanel but has other important data in its favour. Gucci was the luxury brand with the highest publicity impact on Instagram in 2019, according to Tribe Dynamics. Gucci's secret? Many, but one of them was designating more budget to it. Until 2018, Kering, Gucci’s parent company, spent around 20% of its media budget on social media. In 2018, this percentage went up to 50%. This change was soon also applied by the LVMH group. It was a path with no return for fashion: Instagram was a priority.
Success on Instagram is also about creating a community, which Gucci and other brands did very well. Let’s take Valentino as an example. Four years ago, the Italian brand was seven times smaller than Vuitton but surpassed all its peers in Instagram presence as the first in the list of Engagement Labs, which measured the most effective brands on social media. Valentino’s formula was simple: mix content generated by fans with professional photos and answer online comments. Nowadays that’s a pretty common practice, but at the time it was an innovative approach. Balmain and Jacquemus are also interesting case studies which used the designer influencer trend to grow their brands.
But Instagram was also the home of fashion companies outside luxury. Brands such as Zara and H&M also have millions of followers on the social media platform. The most followed fashion brand on Instagram is by far Nike, with 122 million followers as of now. For young designers and small brands, Instagram was also an important tool for growth. If before brands had to be recognized by magazines to make it in the industry, with Instagram, "all they needed" was to build a community. Brands such as Cult Gaia, Ganni, and Rixo all managed to build up their businesses thanks to Instagram. In general, Instagram became the go-to social media for fashion brands, from small ones to the largest players in the industry. With influencers and brands’ possibility to better connect with customers, Instagram basically reshaped the whole fashion industry and this made it the main social media for fashion.
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The Rise of Other Social Media Platforms in Fashion
For now, Millennials are still the generations that most consumes fashion...but these days may be coming to an end soon. Generation Z, which accounts for those born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, is already the largest generation in the Western world. This generation is starting to enter professional life, which gives it more purchasing power. They already account for 40% of consumers globally and Bain & Company estimates they could make up to 40% of the global market for luxury goods by 2035. Why that is relevant? What is Instagram is for Millennials, TikTok and Youtube are for Gen Z. On top of that, Youtube and TikTok are expanding their audience to other age groups, and brands come with it.
Youtube has been expanding its community for a while now. We all watch videos there once in a while, but many Gen Z people follow religiously the content of YouTubers, engaging with them and supporting their channels as we Millennials did with TV celebrities at our time. It is a different way of using it that more recently started to propagate to other generations.
For a long time, fashion was underexplored on Youtube, different from the beauty sector, which is extremely successful on the platform. But in the last few years, many analytical channels started to appear on the video platform. Youtube channels such as HauteLeMode and The Fashion Archive found success by bringing fashion content, criticism, and history in a format that speaks well to a younger audience while also going more in-depth than content on Instagram. Concurrent, brands started to explore more the potential of Youtube. Fashion labels started to sponsor videos and promote Youtubers’ review videos of their pieces. Some brands even started to invest more in the content of their own channel on Youtube. Finally, you could already see Youtube influencers working with prestigious fashion brands, such as Emma Chamberlain with Louis Vuitton.
Finally, we have the phenomenon of TikTok, which is a short video social media platform. For a while, this social media platform was a niche to Gen Z and lip-sync dancing videos. But quickly this social media platform started to gain more and more users with its challenges and due to a content less glossy than Instagram. This large community forming on TikTok made brands such as Burberry and Nike be some of the first to join the platform in the fashion sector. Soon, the big names of TikTok were already being included in the fashion industry. Charli D’Amelio, who conquered over 90 million followers with her dance challenges videos was invited to Prada’s FW 2020 show, while TikTok star Noen Eubanks went from doing lip-sync videos to becoming the face of Celine.
Then, the Covid-19 pandemic came and the inevitable happened: TikTok went officially mainstream. The audience of the platform is still mostly made of users from 16 to 26 years old. However, during the period of lockdown, many people entered the platform, with 12 million new users only in March. This expansion of TikTok’s audience made it impossible for brands to ignore the platform. And TikTok works very differently than its competitors. The content that gets more engagement is user-generated content through challenges. Ralph Lauren for example saw a challenge it released with more than 7 million views, while a produced campaign video had only 8,000. But brands are cracking the mysteries of the app and spending on ads in it.
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The Digital Fashion Weeks
Due to limitations that the Covid-19 pandemic imposed, fashion weeks had to go digital. The first online fashion weeks were in July and were mostly forecasted on Instagram and…Youtube. Almost all brands posted their collections’ presentations on Youtube to be watched by customers, but Instagram was still the go-to platform to consume content about fashion week.
In September when the fashion month arrived, however, the situation changed. TikTok, Youtube, and even Twitch (a live stream social media) did not want to miss out on the opportunity of tapping into the fashion industry.
TikTok came strongest against Instagram’s supremacy in fashion, launching its own Fashion Month. The tech giant partnered with brands such as Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, JW Anderson, and many more to live stream two fashion shows a week. There were also video effects with the theme of the fashion month, for users to interact with the event.
Youtube was where most shows and video content of this season’s fashion month were available after presented. Brands all posted the content on their channels and some got their record numbers on the platform during this September-October.
Even Twitch tapped into digital fashion weeks. Think about Twitch and probably the first thing to come to mind is Millennials playing video games live. Well, this year, the live stream platform decided to enter the race for the crown of fashion’s social media. Their first move was to partner with Burberry, which live-streamed its SS 2021 fashion show on Twitch. The digital event attracted more than 40,000 viewers. What Twitch offers that other platforms don’t is the ability to live stream many different cameras of the same event at the same time while letting users interact with each other and with the brand through a chat. Twitch had already made a few fashion partnerships with Hollister and Sports Direct, but nothing as representative as the Burberry show.
To Who Will the Crown of Fashion Social Media Go To?
Yes, Youtube, Twitch, and especially TikTok are coming hard for Instagram’s supremacy in the fashion industry - but Instagram is fighting back. Not only Instagram has tools similar to all these platforms (IGTV, Reels, and live-streaming), it is also more structured around the fashion industry with shopping tools.
What will probably happen is that brands will have to divide themselves more between these social media platforms. If Instagram is a leader now and received most of the fashion brands' budget, soon this budget distribution will be more balanced. Whenever you work with marketing, is always important to keep track of new platforms so you don't fall behind on the trends. It is always safer to divide a brand’s presence into more than one channel. Social media platforms always come and go and keep an eye on the possible next big one is vital to building a long term business communication. For a while, Instagram was a safe space for fashion brands to invest in. Now, we can see a transition on the way, and keeping an eye on other platforms can make a fashion label more competitive in the future.
As I explained at the beginning of this article, I would follow many brands and influencers on Instagram to keep track of the fashion industry. Nowadays, I’ve been trying to distribute more of my attention to other platforms to keep up with the industry. I am no longer the up and coming generation, which makes it extremely important to better understand Gen Z customer behaviour. Whoever wins the crown of fashion’s go-to social media platform, I want to know how to use it.
Thanks for reading this week’s moderated and next Tuesday I will be back with more.
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To me the best part about having social medias as rivals (in general, not only in the fashion industry) is the development of their own apps to make everything more user-friendly, becoming more accessible and inclusive. I’m an Instagram fan myself (cuz they combine – not in the same successful way, but still… – the same offers of every other platform). Yet, the social media world is a sort of free market, so it is better to have a competition than a monopoly! And that is the main reason why this rivalry pushes them to own development and makes it even harder to mantain a throne such as Instagram tries to. Said that, brands definitely need to dig in whatever that might pop in this contemporary competitive world, otherwise they will easily get digitally old-fashioned!