New York Fashion Week gets trendy on social media

By Danielle Meyer

Just a few weeks ago the brightest and biggest names in fashion sent their collections for spring 2015 strutting down the runways. This week is perhaps one of the biggest for the fashion industry. It is New York Fashion Week.

There were a few new components added to this year’s Fashion Week, particularly in the realm of social media. Of course, Twitter and Instagram were blowing up with posts about the runway shows, the after parties, and the models and designers. According to an article in the New York Times, Michael Kors was the most tweeted about designer of Fashion Week. During the course of the week, the designer’s name was retweeted almost 113,000 times. Ralph Lauren took second for most talked about designer and Alexander Wang came in third. All in all there were nearly 1.25 million tweets in regards to Fashion Week, which skyrocket above the 574,000 recorded last season in February.

However, this year, Snapchat took to the frenzie and added a live stream of all the shows and event so that people in the surrounding New York area could share their own story of Fashion Week with the world. According to an article on New York Observer if users were in a “New York Fashion Week sanctioned event” than they would be able to send snaps into the “Fashion Week in NYC” account that was automatically added to their phones. It was then the job of a team at Snapchat to sort through the media and pull together the best of the best for a live story. Users from all over the world were able to feel as if they were right there in the heart of NYC watching these shows even if they were hundreds of miles away in, say, Athens, Ohio. According to the article there are several benefits that Snapchat has over a platform like Instagram. On Snapchat the content that is shown is handpicked. There’s no need to search through pointless pictures that might not have anything to do with Fashion Week, but instead were simply assigned a hashtag that linked it to the rest. There’s also a sense of exclusivity related to the timed Snapchat stories. There’s something special about only having so much time to view a world-renowned event from the comfort of your living room before it disappears forever.

Not only have social media platforms made headway during this year’s Fashion Week, but top news organizations got in on the action too. The New York Times created and launched it’s own Instagram-esque site, called “Fashion Week Now”. It is similar to Instagram, with photos of Fashion Week available for view, but all the content is handpicked by a team at the Times and focuses mainly on Fashion Week events, whereas Instagram provides an array of Fashion Week news from shows and events to street style. It followed up Fashion Week in New York with posts about London, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks. Currently all of the cities are still featured on the website in order for a full review. New York Magazine also launched an entire page devoted to Fashion Week on their site called, “Fashion Week Uncensored”. This site hosts dozens of articles all related to Fashion Week in the multitude of cities with not only reporters’ commentary but commentary from outside sources as well.

Danielle is junior majoring in strategic communication. She is specializing in english and retail merchandising & fashion product development. After she graduates, she wants to move to a big city, preferably New York, and work in fashion PR. Give her a follow on twitter at @DanielleMeyer17!