Instagrammable: The triumph of fashion shows on social media
updated the 6 October 2015 à 23:15
Everyone knows the intimate relationship that social media and fashion shares but how exactly has the medium allowed designers and artistic talent to excel?
When it comes to social media, the narrative has typically been the same where we talk about the advent of technology opening up a whole new meaning of exposure to fashion, democratising the once insular industry to the highest form ever thought possible. All of which is evident as designers open up their runways, amp up the shock value and flamboyantly decorate them with jaw-dropping, ‘like’-garnering designs.
It’s hard to imagine how limited images from runways used to be before social media came to being – now it’s instant release or risk losing out on the likes. So with that came a greater need for designers, show producers, makeup artists and hairstylists to crank up the fancy factor and egg on editors, bloggers and media personalities to whip out their phones and snap a quick picture. That picture, my friends is the crucial money shot – the shot that will amass immense online verbosity and shares till it reaches that absolute peak we now refer to as viral.
Chanel does this ridiculously well. From the good ol’ days where Karl Lagerfeld simply had a grand lion as his centerpiece to now where he crafts supermarkets, Parisian streets, brasseries and the like, clearly his imaginative spirit is only getting wilder. Lagerfeld was a genius not only in dreaming up conceptual sets but by branding various items on show (especially at the Chanel Shopping Centre) with double interlocking Cs, further spurring editors to spam their Instagram feeds without hesitation. Now this is what we mean when everything is exceptionally Instagrammable. The clothes on display were merely a second thought.
Then we have Louis Vuitton who has in recent seasons experimented with life-sized trains, elevators and carousels and this season Kenzo featured moving runways that chased models around. Also, who can forget Thom Browne’s consistently quirky, larger-than-life and experimental sets that thrill as much as they inspire audiences? All of that not only adds to the experience of fashion week being in the privileged seats but drive people to snap, edit and upload within seconds – all with a trending hashtag of course.
While these uploads do little to drive actual commercial growth, they do aid in allowing everyone else inside the ivory glass sphere of the exclusive fashion world to now bask in the shared experience and allow brands to have their names sprawled across more screens. The more eyeballs they get, the better. So whether it’s Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson crashing Valentino’s runway for epic showdowns, sand dunes a la Prada SS15 or Phillip Plein’s indoor roller coaster, the next time you find yourself the purveyor of such content online, be sure to share the joy forward. After all, when that much artistic effort has gone into crafting such grand works, a little credit beyond the fashion bubble is more than well-deserved.
The only thing we’re left wishing though is for some semblance of the above incredulity to adorn the runways of Singapore’s fashion weeks. Then we’ll be flooding our Instagram feeds to no end and propelling local designers to thrive for longer on the web. After all, once word sticks on the Internet, it stays put.
#BreaktheInternet is the only hashtag to remember next season.
Tarandip Kaur
