The changing face of fashion media today

The changing face of Fashion media today.

Fashion media is the primal way that fashion is communicated to a wider audience, and when looking at fashion media, we have to look at how technological advances have developed all types of media communication to advance. The market for communication is a large and diverse place, many companies spend enormous amounts of money on communicating their product to a wider audience through marketing, advertising and face to face selling. Therefore it’s no surprise that in order to have your product remembered, the way your customer is exposed to it has to be unique and different to the rest. The most innovative fashion media, like online social media is the most important fashion media today.

Social media is a broad term of classification, and not every type of social media can communicate fashion to a viewer effectively. I think that instagram is an extremely important example of fashion media. According to statista.com, there are 800 Million instagram users, and so its no surprise that advertisers turn to it to sell and promote their fashion products. There are ways of categorising instagram as a fashion media, the most popular being the purposeful advertising strategies, such as blogger endorsement or pop up ads. Fashion and beauty bloggers promote and advertise particular fashion and beauty through PR packages. They get sent products, like clothes or accessories and then show the items to the audience by posting about them. Consequently, the viewers think how cool/exciting/new the products are and go and buy them. Looking at fashion blogger Lydia Elise Millen, who is in paid partnership with Karen Millen, a few months ago she instagrammed a photo of her wearing a dress from the company, she described it as “the most perfect dess”, and so, if you, the consumer are looking to buy a dress, you might look at her wearing this “perfect dress” and go and buy it. Lydia has 731 thousand followers on instagram, and 32,727 people have liked the picture, so she has a wide audience who may want the item, and crutially, respect her opinion and trust her style.

However, there are times when paid promotion can permanently damage the consumer-influencer relationship. Recently, Dior sent many bloggers their newly released saddle bag, however, this cause many people's Instagram timelines to become dangeroulsy oversaturated with this small, monogram clad bag resulting in consumers questioning if this influx in bags was coincidence, or if it was too good to be true. many people fought back and threatened to boycott Dior, as they felt they were being overly forced into buying the bag.

Older types of media communication, like magazines are also an important type of fashion media, however, I feel that the key thing about the magazines is that, today, they are not the only type of communication consumers get fed. Marketing is about repetition and reinforcement. If your favourite fashion magazine advertises the latest Dior collection and then your favourite fashion blogger gets sent a dress from Dior to wear for a photoshoot they post on instagram, you might be more tempted to purchase after seeing it in both print and digital types of media again and again, a media technique called “multi screening”

The fashion media of today is ever developing, and so I think that the most interactive ways people are sold products work the best. Social media is becoming its own type of fashion media, and certainly holds the key to a successful fashion product.