Why Did Fashion Show Become A "Arms Race" Of Luxury Brands?

Increasingly fierce competition, luxury

We had to spare no efforts to continue.

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2019 spring and summer Paris

The curtain fell yesterday.

Compared with the increasingly fashionable New York fashion week, the London Fashion week away from the mainstream view and the conservative fashion week in Milan,

As the last high-ranking fashion position is being given more dazzling aura.

Paris fashion week has become an arena for the production of major luxury fashion shows just after the other three fashion week brands have been streamlining their forms, controlling their budgets and even giving up fashion shows.

Fashion itself, even the fashion show itself seems to have been unable to satisfy the desire of luxury brands. This season, many fashion brands in Paris choose to add more forms of dance and film besides the traditional fashion show.

Dior has created an open and continuous modern dance performance space in the long race Racecourse in Paris. Before the fashion show, a modern dance performance from London L-E-V was introduced.

Gucci chose the show site in the Le Palace theater. Before the start of the fashion show, a 80s minutes of the pioneer documentary lasted for a few minutes. During the period, Gucci invited the French national treasure Jane Birkin to sing the Baby Alone in Babylone.

Balenciaga invited digital artist Jon Rafman to create a tubular blue tunnel, which is made up of display screens. The screen is constantly changing with the fashion show, presenting an immersive future experience.

Although Balenciaga is slightly inferior in space area, the cost of digital screen space should not be underestimated.

Even Maison Margiela, who used to keep a low profile, set up a short film projection on the wall of the show space. It continued to play with the fashion show and began previewing videos on social media before the show.

Chanel, a famous fashion show, who has spent a lot of money on the fashion show, once again proved its creative ability. It copied a whole piece of sand beach in Paris's The Grand Palace.

From the computer room to the rocket launch center to the virgin forest, Chanel insisted on moving different landscapes to the The Grand Palace in Paris every quarter.

Even the guests who are so familiar with the big production shows are still surprised at the production of Chanel.

Although the Louis Vuitton, which still closes to its axis, has chosen Le Louvre Museum, it has built a time tunnel on top of it. From the angle of view, the tunnel formed a luminous polygon.

Though expensive, fashion shows seem to have become more important than ever before.

In the past, the minimalist brands began to make an effort to express their sense of form. In the past, fashion shows were used as the brand of large events, and more investment was devoted to making more budgets, manpower and creativity in fashion shows.

Taking Celine as an example, Celine in the Phoebe Philo era did not neglect the design of the exhibition space. The brand used to collaborate with artist Philippe Parreno to design the exhibition facilities, but the atmosphere of the show only served as a supplement to the fashion show, and its purpose was not to attract attention.

This season, the new Celine began to build a silver mirror geometry device in the ancient building Hotel des Invalides. With the rotation of the geometric device, the model landed on the lifting device.

The design of the show with great visual impact reveals the fundamental change of the logic of fashion show, that is, from the prominence of the fashion series itself to the change of brand topic.

The Celine, which began to assume the LVMH business mission, may reveal its new ambitions from the brilliant exhibition design.

High fashion in early twentieth Century

Began hiring models in small salons to show their latest works to customers.

As a social activity, fashion show initially helped Paul Poiret and other first fashion designers to lay the foundation in the circle.

Then the scale of the fashion show grew from small to large, and the date was gradually fixed.

Since the 50 year of twentieth Century, fashion shows have changed from social activities to media, playing an important catalytic role in the pformation of fashion from advanced customization to ready-made garments.

Although the fashion show breaks the way of one to one communication, but from designers, fashion shows, fashion editors, to consumers who buy fashion magazines by fashion, the chain of fashion information is still long, so the fashion magazines in the chain of communication have mastered authority.

But when the advent of the Internet and social media broke the asymmetry of the fashion show information and allowed viewers to watch the fashion show synchronously through live broadcast and high-definition pictures, the privileges of fashion show guests began to collapse and the immaterial luxury of the fashion show was also weakened.

The fashion show starts to face two kinds of destiny. One is to achieve comprehensive digitalization, the two is to provide an irreplaceable reality experience.

Now the imbalance of the four fashion week is the result of this. The Paris fashion week, which is full of head brands, is flooded with the big show, while the other three fashion weeks are getting dim.

On the one hand, the fashion show as a marketing tool has begun to age. The poorly performing fashion brands have begun to tighten their belts in the current uncertain retail environment. Many brands are no longer willing to spend a lot of money on fashion shows considering the return on investment.

Without huge social media input to fashion show publicity, the audience of a fashion show will be at most 500, while the brand prefers to spend more on digital marketing with higher returns.

On the other hand, luxury brands with adequate marketing budgets choose second ways to pform fashion shows into a comprehensive sensory marketing campaign.

By leveraging the social influence of the guests, it brings the topic and popularity to the brand, which is also the most important reason for the luxury brand to do the fashion show.

In the past, many people thought that luxury brands should not be overexposed, but now the luxury industry has undergone drastic changes.

Although the development of social media has shortened the chain of communication, competition is becoming more and more intense under the limited attention of consumers. It is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to effectively touch consumers.

The total expenditure spent on marketing in Chanel last year for marketing promotion, fashion shows and hosting events amounted to 1 billion 460 million US dollars, or about 10 billion yuan.

"We are not worried about overexposure. The real risk is not enough momentum to compete in the market." Jean-Jacques Guiony, chief financial officer of LVMH, responded earlier to the question of whether Louis Vuitton was over exposed. He pointed out that the aim was to keep the brand "still fresh in the long run".

The business logic of luxury goods has not changed, and the brand that has invested heavily in brand marketing has also gained more performance growth.

But with the increasingly fierce competition in the industry, fashion week has also become an arms race for luxury brands.

LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault once said that the luxury industry must never despise marketing, and if it does not do marketing, it will not be based on the luxury market.

It is thought-provoking that this way of thinking has spawned the phenomenon that the marketing ability of the fashion industry is stronger than that of fashion.

Judging from this season, Burberry and Celine, which performed large-scale marketing before the show, were not satisfactory in the presentation of the fashion series itself, making the trouble of creating a great weakness after the show.

The theme of Chanel fashion show is concentrated on the scene of the show, rather than the series itself, which has become a major criticism of Chanel.

Apart from social topics, another reason for luxury brands to run shows is the desire and inertia of luxury brands trying to preserve the old mode. In today's uncertain environment, despite the fact that brands choose to abandon fashion shows based on the actual situation, few brands really want to subvert the fashion show that has lasted for nearly a century.

Luxury brands consider more about how to improve the fashion week form to make fashion week's experience unique and irreplaceable, so as to maintain the "dream making" experience brought by fashion shows, and indirectly safeguard the high-end customers and media relations invited to participate in fashion shows every season.

What's more, with the flat experience of the Internet and electricity providers, consumers are tired of it. Recently, offline scenes are beginning to usher in a comeback. More and more people are beginning to pay attention to the special experience brought about by physical activities, which is reflected in the rebound of physical retailing in retailing.

Therefore, the scene experience of fashion show is becoming more and more important. The brand is always pursuing a more realistic, more magnificent, immersive, more space-time pformation experience, through various forms of feeling to enhance the audience's sensory impression.

Luxury brands know very well that emotions are the most suitable currency for social media.

In fact, it also reveals the changing nature of fashion with the evolution of the times, that is, fashion is no longer just clothes, but a cultural atmosphere and way of life.

Since Vetements, which was named after the French "clothes", presented the ordinary clothes on the T stage and evolved into some popular culture, the focus of fashion just deviated from the clothes themselves again.

Fashion or clothing itself replaces the second place. In fashion shows, it gives way to the ambience of deliberately creating. Besides fashion shows, it also gives way to the overall image of the brand and is covered by a large-scale marketing offensive.

This is understandable, because fashion is the representative and product of life style since it was born. It has been alienated by various means of modern business and accelerated by the Internet. The meaning of fashion has become more and more simple and direct, and has been constantly enlarged.

The popular nature of the clothing makes the fashion show just follow the model from the serial number to the later stage, then add the music to foil the atmosphere, then to the more and more magnificent show now, bypassing the obstacles of the fashion show and the clothes, and directly convey the story of the brand to the consumers and the story they want to tell.

In the 2018 September series brought by Riccardo Tisci for Burberry, he claims to return to the charismatic complexity of fashion itself (sophistication) by presenting a mixture of British lifestyle.

But the harsh reality of the industry today is that people even do not have the patience to read the press releases on the show seats. The contemporary human nature selectively shields the information that requires brain searching and is more willing to receive clear and bright signals.

With the birth of the Internet, young consumers are beginning to lose interest in designers' interest. Just as they have abandoned literary masterpieces and choose to receive updated social media information streams, they do not like to speculate.

Marketing is important, but what is worrying is whether the arms race fashion show is designed to conceal and condone the impoverishment of creativity.