Alexander McQueen

A few announcements in the past couple of weeks have made me ponder the place that real-time social media plays in fashion events. During Toronto Fashion Week, all social media was forbidden during events and shows; organizers blamed weak ticket sales for this shortsighted decision. The media (traditional and “new”) and readers agreed that wasn’t the way to go and some critics even went as far as to say it set the industry back several years.

As we discussed in “Fashionably Late to the Party“, it’s only to a brand’s, retailer’s or event’s advantage to leverage the power and the speed with which information is spread across social networks. The fear of relinquishing control of the brand message is what continues to fuel rejection of social mediums.  What fashion industry professionals don’t understand is that by empowering and joining social communities, they are actually gaining back some of that control by being able to respond in real time to criticism or critiques.

Alexander McQueen made a bold decision during NYFW S/S 2010 to live stream his show straight from the runways. By being able to stream quality video and encouraging shareability, McQueen is attempting to replace the low quality YouTube videos. Replacing lower quality, amateur style video is a smart decision because it:

1. Lowers the barrier between the industry and consumers, everyone gets the same picture and preview; not some get it now and some get it after the fact.

2. As consumers, we’re thrilled to watch an exclusive show in real time, as it shows the brand values our opinions, we are more  likely to purchase it, especially if it’s available in a timely manner.

3. We are watching and salivating over beautiful fashions in high-quality video, the way it’s meant to be seen, which preserves the brand equity as synonymous with haute couture and high quality.

4. We love the experience so much that we will share the archives and blog / tweet about them. All of this is going to increases McQueen’s visibility, brand recognition and raising “cool points” with the Internet generation.

Twitter: Alexander McQueen Consumer Trends

So what actually happened when McQueen streamed his show on Tuesday? LadyGaGa, who has more than 1 million followers tweeted that her song “Bad Romance” was debuting at the show, and her fans essentially crashed the site. He made a great decision to make the show available for the post-event playback, and millions of people around the world were able to see it. However, the chatter surrounding the event and viewers’ reactions was incredible on Twitter. The screenshot to the left shows Twitter search results going 100 pages deep for just one day (to see the high-res image, just click the screenshot). Even though the reaction was varied, ranging from “McQueen is a visionary” to “McQueen hates women. Are we back to female foot binding?” In the end, McQueen succeeded in creating tremendous buzz by opening up his show to the “masses” in his attempt to democratize the world of fashion.

How  McQueen could have made the experience even better:

The streaming interface was sorely missing community and sharing options. To really take the most advantage of the public’s attention, McQueen should’ve made sharing (the real time video and the archives) painfully easy; piggybacking on existing social network login credentials. Using existing credentials is very important, having to create a proprietary login account would slow down and maybe even prevent the ability and desire to share. Moreover, the site would’ve benefited tremendously from community features. Viewers should be able to comment and chat with each other about what they are seeing. This would have increased engagement during and after the event. People would have been “chattering” all around the web and McQueen could have provided a designation to do that around the runway show. The live feedback and responses on the destination site could have provided invaluable market research.

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