When street photography began to prevail four or five years ago, someone once wrote a guide on how to be photographed by the famous street photography blog The Sartorialist during Fashion Week. The way of instruction seems a bit unreliable now. I wear it according to this guide. Effectively, unless the blogger Scott Schuman knows that you are a big man, I guess you won’t let him raise the camera even if you wander in front of him a hundred times.
To be photographed and published by well-known street photography bloggers such as The Sartorialist and his girlfriend, Garance Doré, who is also a street photography blogger, and Tommy Ton, etc., that’s true It is difficult. Fortunately, street shooting has become a standard feature. Every media outlet has to take street shooting. There are a large number of photographers who do not enter the show and only engage in street shooting outside of the show. In addition, various fashion bloggers haunt, it is possible to be photographed. Sex is still quite big.
One or two years ago, fashionistas who wanted to attract street photography were a bit embarrassed, so they often carried a SLR, pretending to be a street blogger, and no one shot it, so the two people would take a SLR to take a photo of each other to warm up the field. Someone started taking pictures, and other photographers would gather.
In this season of Paris Fashion Week, as far as I can see, there are fewer fashionistas who pretend to be street bloggers, and more people in strange costumes and even incomprehensible ones. There was an old man with only one tooth left, wearing a big Arab robe and carrying a torn leather bag. From the first day to the last day, he appeared at the door of almost every show, and no one shot him. In the past, in addition to the real big coffee, Japanese men in women's clothing and Russian ladies are the kings of stealing the spotlight, and the black men in suits and shoes have passed away. If you say that the new force is now, it is the Chinese. I saw a group of men and women at this fashion week, about ten people, who always arrived 15 minutes before the show. They really dressed and had their own personality. They only looked at the entrance without entering the venue or talking. Standing not far away. I thought they were Koreans. Later, I hurried past them and heard the authentic Mandarin. They were discussing where to wait for the next one.
It's a pity that these local students are definitely no match for fashion editors from China. Some editors were so prosperous that they even took the high-end costumes borrowed for the magazine filming and used them as shawls to watch the show, making unforgivable low-level mistakes. The editors of major journals rely on the sample clothing resources in their hands, unless they meet the rich second generation who is not short of money, they will definitely see who will destroy who.
Having said so many off-site street shootings, I actually wanted to show that the fashion week now is not what it used to be. Fashion critic Suzy Menkes wrote an article last year that fashion week has become a circus, full of peacocks like Anna Della Russo, who change their clothes every time they attend a show. . She missed the era when she was called the Black Crow a dozen or two decades ago. At that time, Fashion Week did not have the current influence. The editors were standing on the side of the road in the costumes of Rei Kawakubo or Yohji Yamamoto, and passers-by would think they were coming. Participating in the funeral, in fact, they were also super avant-garde at the time. Interestingly, during this Paris Fashion Week, 70-year-old Susie Menkes moved to the Condé Nast Group as a fashion commentator on the international website of Vogue. Obviously, she is also welcoming the online world. She now enters the show with a cane, and while the peacocks are taking pictures, she still takes advantage of the break in the show and takes out the code word of the laptop to rush to draft. I really look forward to how her fashion commentary will compete with the images of the picture-reading era in the next fashion week.
At one time, buyers were the group that needed the most attention from brands on fashion shows. But now the top brands such as Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, etc. all open their own direct stores, and there is no need to ask retailers to buy them. Therefore, for these brands that dominate the market, the fashion show has become a complete marketing campaign, and the designer’s work is only a small part of it. The reason is simple: during the period of the show’s release, the For consumers, clothes for the spring and summer of 2014 have just begun to go on the market, and not many people will think about what to wear in autumn and winter.
Since it is a promotion, celebrities are too important. A few years ago, female celebrities followed fashion magazines to attend the show of major brands, which indeed brought huge exposure in the mass media and social media. However, celebrities are different from fashionistas. Among the domestic first- and second-tier celebrities, some have established endorsement relationships with the brand, and some have become close friends of the brand. There are very few candidates for media cooperation. Nowadays, domestic celebrities are rarely willing to go to fashion week at their own expense, so in general, there are not so many celebrities going to fashion week this year as in the previous year or two. Of course, this way, when foreign media publish photos of Chinese celebrities, the embarrassment of right and wrong names will also be reduced.
So where are the buyers during Fashion Week? In fact, they have not decreased, but gathered in those brands that are somewhat niche in the country, and those fashion shows are more in line with the original appearance. As agents of these brands, JOYCE and Lane Crawford of the same group often get more than a dozen front-row invitations for a show, but sometimes buyers may not have time to see them. They are more willing to go to the exhibition hall to see "resee" up close after the show, after all, it takes real money to place an order. How many people do buyers need? Lane Crawford President Andrew Keith said that Lane Crawford’s newly opened 7,600 square meter store in Chengdu is equipped with 85 buyers, of which 40% of the brands are exclusively sold in Chengdu. Consider the Lane Crawford flagship store that opened in Shanghai last year, with an area of 14,000 square meters. You can figure out how many buyers it will cost. Frankly speaking, this travel expense is not a small amount.
With the rise of domestic buyer stores, more and more domestic buyers are also rushing to the four major fashion weeks. This time, I also met a few of them during Paris Fashion Week. One of them told me that after the original fashion week, she would stay in Paris for more than a dozen days. This time she applied for fewer tickets. She mainly went to the exhibition hall. After the fashion week, she returned to China to try to save on travel expenses. Reduce the domestic retail prices even more. This pragmatic attitude shows that domestic fashion retailers have gradually matured. Going to fashion week is not only for the sake of face, but also for business.
