Each morning on the way to work I walk through David Pecuat Square, which has been invaded by Fashion Week Toronto’s white tents this week. I am a pretty avid follower of Fashion weeks, although I do tend to neglect the Canadian ones. Nonetheless, the latest Fashion weeks in New York, Milan, and London are still fresh in my mind and my new job and consequently exposure to ScribbleLive has got me thinking about how the former could use the latter.
Documenting the latest trends and styles is what fashion is all about, the demand for this content is there, popular blog and content sharing tools like Pinterest and Tumblr are filled with fashion photos.
While this week’s fashion week is being covered to some extent by news sources through blogs and more traditional methods, I do not think that anyone has really used liveblogging to its potential. The Toronto Star has used the “poll feature” of ScribbleLive to ask about the latest trends and styles seen at the event. They also have a live feed of their reporters’ tweets on their website.
Well, I began to think about all the different places I go to in order to get a comprehensive coverage of, say, New York Fashion week. I like to see the actual collection. I also like to see what all the attendees are wearing, so I check out Style.com. My favorite street photographer is Scott Schuman, so I’ll follow his blog The Sartorialist particularly closely during fashion weeks. I love to get models’ intimate points of views of the show, you can usually find the top models sharing backstage photos on Twitter via instagram, yfrog, and twitpic. Editors and fashion bloggers also comment on their favorite piece as they watch the show through Twitter and their own blogs.
To get such complete coverage, I need to follow all these people on Twitter, visit their blogs, look through Style.com, and more. Now, if I was a top fashion house, what I would do is I would encourage the models, photographers, editors, and celebrities who are participating in my show to share this content in one place. Most of the top fashion houses already have solid social media strategies with presence on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and others. But while this allows their consumers to interact with their content in the way they’re most comfortable with, there is no place where fans can find complete coverage of an event.
This is where a tool like ScribbleLive would come in. Let’s say one of the major brands wanted to use the tool to cover their show during Milan Fashion week. They would set up a liveblog, which could be seamlessly integrated into their website or added as a widget into their Facebook page—depending on where they want/need traffic to go. Then set up attendees such as celebrities, editors, models, guests, show directors as writers on the liveblog. They would decide whether they wanted to grant readers the option to write in the liveblog as well (with various levels of moderation). If they are streaming the show live, they can pin the stream to the top of their liveblog, so readers could watch the show as they read the latest updates.
The result? A record of the fashion show as it unfolds, from various points of view. Models gushing about what they’re wearing and photographing their hair and makeup. Street photographers sharing what editors, celebrities and attendees are wearing as they enter the venue. As everyone is seated, the excitement of the show is shared, what is everyone wearing? How does the stage look? Do you have a good seat? Can you believe **** is somehow seated in the front row? Then, the lights go out, the music starts, and the models begin their journey down the runway, the collection comes to life. Photos of the pieces are shared from different angles and videos are shared to demonstrate the pieces in motion.
Below is an event I created, surrounding Paris Fashion Week, which was months ago – but I populated it with content from YouTube, Twitpic, Yfrog, and Twitter. If the event was actually happening, the content would be more rich and diverse, e.g. you could follow the #PFW hashtag, which I couldn’t since there’s nothing being tweeted about it now. Nonetheless, it should give you an idea about what the content on the liveblog would look like.
All this content is shared instantaneously as it is published, without refreshing the page, without any delay. Fans can get a real feel for the atmosphere of the show and connect with the brand on a whole new level.
