Engaged in the clothing industry for 20 years.

Fashion seeks dedicated followers with influence online

Once kept firmly at arm’s length by the
fashion world, influencers are now courted alongside big celebrity names by
emerging talents keen to leverage their millions of online followers.

“Influencers will have a leading role in building the legitimacy of
creators,” Delphine Dion, professor at France’s ESSEC Business School, told
AFP.

“It is thanks to them that many designers will manage to break through.”

The cream of TikTok and Instagram flocked to Masha Popova’s show on Sunday
as part of London Fashion Week.

The young Ukrainian designer counted TikTok superstar Abby Roberts, who has
more than 16 million followers, among her guests.

“I was in the front row with six other influencers, so I think we are doing
well,” said TikTok, Instagram and YouTube content creator Emma Winder after
the show.

Avant-garde

To be a fashion influencer who matters, you first have to be “trusted by
the big names” in the industry, said Dion.

Next you can build a name for yourself as someone with “extremely
cutting-edge tastes who can help new fashion players emerge”.

“It’s exactly like the avant-garde dynamics you get in art. You look for
the very niche to show you are even more fashionable than the rest,” she added.

The phenomenon is particularly visible on the catwalks at London Fashion
Week, known worldwide for giving emerging talents a platform.

Fashionable influencers and stars such as Zendaya, Billie Eilish, Hailey
Bieber or Kylie Jenner have been seen wearing outfits by the new generation of
designers including Masha Popova, Di Petsa, Chet Lo, Feben, or Yuhan Wang.

‘Instant reaction’

It’s a win-win situation for influencers as it’s now much “cooler” to wear
clothes by young designers than a luxury brand, said Elizabeth Stiles, a
consultant for fashion brands.

And from the designer’s point of view, it’s “definitely faster to grow your
brand through social media just through the way it works”, she said.

When an influencer posts content “you get an instant reaction, versus
magazines where even on-line, it still takes time to write that article and
upload it and maybe go through an approval process as well with an editor”,
she added.

Social media content creators can also benefit from a good engagement rate,
which measures how well their posts interact with their community.

An influencer with a high engagement rate posting a photo, dressed by a
young label, is more likely to generate sales for the brand.

‘Everyone welcome’?

Competition between traditional media — including specialist fashion
magazines — and former fashion bloggers who are now influencers on TikTok,
Instagram or YouTube is not new.

The influential British journalist Susie Lau began with her fashion blog
“Style Bubble” in 2006.

Now she writes notably for the British magazine Pop and The Business of
Fashion and is also followed by nearly 700,000 people on Instagram.

In an article published in Grazia in 2017 titled “Everyone should be
welcome in fashion”, she said she regretted the “negative connotations” that
had attached themselves to fashion bloggers, influencers and content creators.

Even as recently as February, she denounced the “gall of most print media”
who still in 2023 sneered at influencers.

This, she said, was “hilarious, considering how many have adopted social
media modus operandi”.(AFP)

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