As you may have noticed, I’m quite fascinated by the growing commercialisation of Fashion Week. More than anyone, Topshop has been instrumental in making Fashion Week accessible to all, via its sponsorships and collabs with LFW designers, it’s unsurpassed social media LFW coverage, its just announced Facebook hook-up and most recently, its pop-up shops at the LFW sites. (more…)
Here’s a little backstage beauty nugget I found out recently. See that backstage beauty station? See those hairspray-like cans wrapped in parcel tape? That’s a little known secret of fashion shows. When big beauty brands sponsor shows, they want their and only their branding in the backstage shots. So MAC doesn’t want a stray Lancome mascara wand in view at a MAC-sponsored show and Toni & Guy doesn’t want a can of Elnett upstaging its products if it’s paying for exclusive endorsement. All well and good, but it seems there’s an understanding that sometimes X product is the only one that will do for X star hairdresser. So the solution is to cover it in gaffer tape to disguise the branding. In fact, some say that Toni & Guy’s black-clad Label M product packaging was so designed to mimic the gaffer-tape look I just described. Who knew?
[Image: Grazia Daily/BaByLiss]
Last season Topshop took the chance to turn London Fashion Week into a shopping opportunity. This season, Ebay is jumping in with an online pop-up shop to support Henry Holland. As part of the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Forward initiative, Ebay is supporting Mary Katrantzou, Louise Gray and House of Holland with sponsorship, as well as live-streaming their SS13 shows on its Style Collective blog (where – ahem – you can also read some of my fashion musings). As a logical tie-in, it’s also selling an edited selection of House of Holland AW12 on Ebay.co.uk from today until 18th September, with each purchase sent out with a pair of Henry Holland’s phenomenally popular tights.
Gotta say it, this is a great example of 360° thinking; a neat way to bring the buzz of LFW directly to fashion-hungry shoppers while driving sales to Ebay and House of Holland. OK, you can’t buy the SS13 collection straight off the runway (to my knowledge) but maybe we’ll get that by next season.
Will you be buying?
A few months ago, there was a big old hoo-ha when Fashion Editor at Large published a post about River Island’s blogger-inspired range. The range is part of the River Island AW12 collection and was presented during the press preview but there was a bit of an uproar from bloggers feeling they were being lumped together in a ‘blogger style’ of clashy prints and OTT ‘please-photograph-me’ accessories. The collection is now trickling onto the shop floor so to coincide, I emailed some questions to River Island’s brand director, Farida Kaikobad to find out how a high street brand puts its collections together in these crazy speedy-to-market times, how blogging and social media affects the brand and how that blogger range came about… (more…)
