At Fashion Week, a Peek at a New Tactic for Marketers
Watching the runways at New York Fashion Week can be an overwhelming experience for the editors and buyers who will descend on the city in the next few days. — Several dozen models will sashay up and down the stage in just over 10 minutes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks before this story, Polyvore raised fresh funding and installed a new chief executive — evidence that investors were already betting on software platforms sitting between fashion brands and their audiences. That followed years of build-up: a 2009 Times piece on a site letting fans play designer, and 2008 coverage of early trends in New York online advertising.
Against that backdrop, the Bits report captures marketers treating New York Fashion Week itself as a test bed — pitching a new tactic directly at the editors and buyers who decide what reaches stores, rather than at consumers through traditional placements.
First-order effects
- Editors and buyers arriving for the February 2012 shows become the immediate target of the tactic, giving brands a direct line to the people who filter trends for the mass market.
Second-order effects
- Digital fashion intermediaries like Polyvore — freshly capitalized that January — are positioned to productize whatever works on the runway floor, turning an experimental stunt into a repeatable brand-marketing channel.
Third-order effects
- If runway-side experimentation keeps proving out, fashion marketing shifts structurally from print placements and front-row seating toward data-rich digital channels, with platform operators capturing the budget that once went to legacy media.
The trend: Fashion's marketing spend is migrating from gated industry events toward tech-mediated channels, with each Fashion Week serving as a live laboratory for the next tactic.