Silicon Valley's Presence at Fashion Week Is Growing

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Facebook, Instagram, Google, Pinterest, Twitter—all will be present and accounted for next week during fashion week in New York, where designers will show their collections for spring 2014. Despite questions about how much good social media actually does for fashion brands' bottom lines, WWD reports that a mobile and online presence is seen as increasingly important to designers. More and more of them are inviting the masses for a glimpse into their worlds.

For example, Twitter's 6-second video tool, Vine, has recruited the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Lucky's new editor in chief Eva Chen and Tim Gunn to create videos as part its #fashioninmotion campaign. A "live-Vining" program, #Behindthefashion, will feature Oscar de la Renta, Kenneth Cole, Rebecca Minkoff and Badgley Mischka showing the designers preparing for their shows.

Realtime Instagram feeds displayed on giant screens will appear at Lincoln Center where many of the shows take place as well as Milk Studios, another show venue and the department store Barneys New York.

And Pinterest is entering the fray in a targeted way for the first time this season. The company has partnered with more than 100 important folks in fashion to pin away at http://pinterest.com/fashionweek. Look for pins from Michael Kors, Kate Spade, Lucky magazine, Elle, WWD, Garance Doré, Into the Gloss, Nordstrom, Oscar de la Renta, 3.1 Phillip Lim, and lots more.

Whether all these efforts sell clothes is the big question. Having a strong social media presence seems to have been a boon for West Elm, which is in a different category of retail, but perhaps its success is telling. Designers like Oscar de la Renta seem to be playing both sides of the coin: While he's participating in Pinterest's and Twitter's fashion week efforts, he's also making his show more exclusive by significantly scaling it down to a small number of select guests. Since the effectiveness of social media is tough to quantify, perhaps that's not a bad approach.
· West Elm's Social Media Savvy Boosts the Bottom Line [Racked SF]
· Gap Pegs Hopes on Social Media in Back to Blue Campaign [Racked SF]
· Social Media Strategy Now Key to Shows [WWD]