By BRITTANY CHANDANI
New York Fashion Week runs from Sept. 10 through 17, setting the style precedent for the upcoming season with international designer shows of Spring/Summer 2016 collections.
New York Fashion Week is one of the most coveted events to attend by young women and socialites alike. Celebrities like Jessica Alba, Steven Tyler, Julia Roberts and Kylie Jenner attend the star-studded event to watch famous models walk the runway, showcasing new trends from designers like Altuzarra, Alexander Wang, Diane Von Furstenburg and Carolina Herrera.
NYFW’s website streams the fashion shows in real time, beginning at 11 a.m., while also providing links to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. The great variety of social media coverage has revolutionized the way Fashion Week is covered. Hashtags #NYFW, #MBFW or “hashtag-ing” the designer’s name, provides a categorical expanse of fashion week happenings. Snapchat, a video messaging application, now has its own story attributed to Fashion Week, allowing those who access the app to conveniently view coverage. Celebrities and fashion icons tweet in real time what they see onstage and backstage.
The viewer stress to provide real time content is changing the way journalists report on fashion week. As social media are the easiest and most efficient platform for this raw coverage, it is now the norm. The emphasis on backstage and behind the scenes coverage is made possible by social media, as it is easier to report quickly by snapping a photo on a phone and uploading it straight to Twitter, along with a caption and appropriate hashtags.
In past years, The Wall Street Journal did not cover Fashion Week in real time, but instead wrote and published stories prior to Fashion Week; after Fashion Week, editors would publish articles around the time the collections would reach stores.
The growing demand to view raw visual content such as backstage production, has coupled with increased methods of social media coverage. Journalists are now obliged to use many forms of social media to make Fashion Week more viewable by all.