This London Fashion Week, starting 15th February 2013, the British Fashion Council (BFC) continues to unite fashion and digital innovation, encouraging engagement with the global fashion showcase through social media, live streaming and pioneering new technologies.
For the first time this season, the BFC have partnered with YouTube and will be live streaming 21 of the on-schedule catwalk shows through the LFW channel, youtube.com/LFWTV. The world’s largest video platform will be home to a customized London Fashion Week profile, broadcasting daily catwalk shows to a global audience.
In total 34 shows - over 60% of the catwalk schedule – will be live streamed, including 21 from the Courtyard Show Space at Somerset House, 8 courtesy of Topshop from their venue at the Tate Modern, as well as shows outside the main catwalk venue including Burberry, Mulberry, Moschino, Henry Holland and Holly Fulton.
The BFC continue to work closely with Twitter to promote conversation around London Fashion Week using the hashtag #LFW and by mentioning the official account @LondonFashionWk.
This season sees the introduction of the dedicated Twitter Events Page. The events page provides fashion followers from around the world with a one-stop destination to see the best live London Fashion Week content on Twitter. The events page will aggregate tweets from all areas of the industry, including designers, retailers, press and celebrities, as well as including show highlights and exclusive behind the scenes insights to recreate an industry insider’s experience at London Fashion Week.
The highly successful Twitter Q&A sessions return for AW13. Using the hashtag #AskLFW, followers can pose question in real-time to guests on Twitter. Guests for this season include Manolo Blahnik CBE, winner of the Outstanding Achievement Award and creator of the exclusive imagery for the London Fashion Week campaign; designer Henry Holland, and one of the fashion industry’s foremost bloggers, Bip Ling. The Q&A sessions will be brought to a close on Tuesday 19th by renowned journalist and Editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman.
The London Fashion Week Timeline will take to Twitter, keeping track of the shows throughout the week with live updates of start times, united by the hashtag #LFWtimeline.
The BFC will be using Vine this season as a brand new way to interact with audiences, capturing exciting moments as the action unfolds in the format of six second videos. From backstage beauty clips to the final looks on the runway, members of the BFC team will be publishing show highlights as never seen before using the new Vine app. The Instagram Insiders return for AW13 offering a behind the scenes take on the showcase through the official Instagram account.
The team of Instagram Insiders will be uploading backstage shots, exclusives from the events and insights of their own experiences throughout the five days. The BFC will continue to use the official Pinterest account to upload daily content from the catwalk, as well as street style and event imagery and video footage on dedicated pin boards. The public can get in involved through #LFW live , a real-time feed aggregating images that use the hashtag #LFW from Instagram and Twitter.
The Fash/On Film , sponsored by River Island, initiative will continue to showcase the best of emerging film-making talent in fashion. The Fash/On Film panel has curated a dedicated fashion film programme to be screened in the Canon Cinema each day of London Fashion Week. Members of the panel will host Q&A sessions at screenings with directors, film makers and designers including Fred Butler and Kitty Joseph as they discuss their films for the new season.
Three emerging designers have been awarded Fash/On Film support this season to make films, these are My Crazy Scrunchie , Leutton Postle and Fred Butler . The films will premiere at the Fash/On Film event on Friday 15th February and will launch the official Digital Schedule for autumn/winter 2013. The event will also showcase films from SHOWstudio and Nick Knight. Over 30 films will be screened over the course of the week in the Canon Cinema . The Canon Cinema is London Fashion Week’s digital showcasing space, and has been fitted out with the latest in Canon XEED projection equipment. Canon is the Digital Showcasing Partner of London Fashion Week.
The LFW Daily newspaper will be brought to digital life, as the cover and Catwalk Highlight shots turn into shows through Aurasma . Using a mobile device, visitors simply need to download the free Aurasma Lite app and then hold it over the LFW image, at which point it will spring to life with exclusive video content and daily highlights.
London Fashion Week designers will also be implementing their own digital strategies to engage new audiences.
Topshop have partnered with Google to give viewers access to every aspect of the show using all of Google’s platforms. Highlights include models wearing HD micro cameras allowing viewers online to ‘Be the model’, as if they were walking down the runway; a ‘Be the Buyer App’ where fans to create their own mood boards mixing together pieces from the runway; and models Cara Delevigne, Jourdan Dunn, Rosie Tapner and Ashleigh Good will bring users along the ‘Road to the runway’, a digital diary from the first fitting to the moment they hit the catwalk on Google+.
For Autumn/Winter 2013, Matthew Williamson will be using digital innovation to bring his social media audience even closer than the front row. International backstage photographer Sean Cunningham will be exclusively shooting the collection using Vine, in 6-second video clips which will zoom in from the full look to the minute detail, then tweeted live as the looks hit the runway. In these shots, attention is drawn to the intricate craftsmanship within the collection that can often be overlooked on the runway. Follow @MWWorld on Twitter and watch out for the hashtag #MatthewMagnified.
