Influence of Internet and Social Media on Fashion Industry

Shubham Anil Jain
Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited
Bangalore, India
Email: shubhamajain125@gmail.com

Introduction:
When the social media in the fashion industry is concerned, it refers to the use of various social media platforms by many fashion designers and consumers to promote and take part in trends. During the COVID-19 social media has came more in picture and created new channels of advertising for fashion oriented houses to reach their target markets. It’s emergence has increased in 2009, where many luxury fashion brands have used social media to build interactions between the brand and its customers to increase awareness and involvement. Many social media platforms are created and being used to promote fashion trends, with Instagram and TikTok being the most popular nowadays.

Impact of Social Media on Fashion Industry:

1. In 2009, the usage of social media technology by luxury fashion brands has been adopted, due to which it encouraged customers to interact with many brands. These kinds of customer interactions have enhanced the brand by increasing awareness, participation and engagement.

2. Many social media platforms like, tweets, blogs, and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest has provided fashion brands ways to connect with audiences. Initially, many fashion brands thought that social networking would weaken the relationship with their users, but in today’s world social media is now viewed as an opportunity to improve customer relationships and to engage a larger number audience with them.

3. Because of the rise of the rise of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) has enhanced interest in word of mouth and viral marketing among many of luxury brands across the world. Word of mouth (WOM) is nothing but a interpersonal communication about products and services between consumers and is found as one of the most influential sources of marketplace information for consumers.

4. When WOM is taken to travels Internet, it can become more viral and most powerful, regardless of whether the news or information is good or bad. For followers, it is becoming some kind of tough to sort out the facts, since the proximity of information is extreme with no standard to determine the truth. The kind of spread of information brings people to a common field to exchange views.

5. For example, Los Angeles day-to-day celebrity wear, has become a worldwide fact, partly due to social media regulating the casual look. Vintage stores, showcasing T shirts and jeans, permeating the Los Angeles casual style, are the retail place of consumers found anywhere throughout the world.

6. Currently, fashion has reached everywhere, mostly due to the internet. “Blogs” provide consumers an almost unlimited space for self-expression on the Internet. A personal websites, “usually managed by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video, where entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order” is known as blogs.

7. Unalike fashion-focused magazines and television shows, there are many of fashion blogs worldwide that are managed regularly with new fashion trends. The blog’s effectiveness is due to its strong individual, personal, popular, and elitist point of view. Its appealing experience offers readers the opportunity to express their opinions and challenge fashion critics.

8. In the last two years, there is a growth in many of the fashion apps such as iPhone, iPad, and iPod. These apps offer customers latest deals, information about current fashion trends, the comfort of shopping directly from an iPhone, iPad or iPod, and ease of social sharing. Pose, is a fashion app full of blogger images and ideas. Here, the specialty is that users can score the latest looks from fashionistas and fashion icons as well as share favorite fashion finds and outfits. Even more, like Facebook, Instagram, users interchange with styles, and share Twitter Pose tweets.

Benefits of Social Media in Fashion Industry:

1. Advertising:
Currently, Social media is a prominent use of advertisement in the fashion industry. Due to this, it has resulted into Information sharing, which impacts social consumer involvement with fashion brands. Fashion industries are taking help of social media platforms to reach customers on emotional levels and increase engagement with brand images and messages. Researchers in the United Kingdom have proved that interacting with consumers with social media messages that express social passion, social tendency, and personal warmth can uplift the social engagement with fashion brands. In social area, fashion is a important method for individuals to represent their identity through clothing.

2. Influencers:
Companies used celebrities name, fame and social standing to advertise their brands, such as Tommy Hilfiger did when integrating social media into their one of the marketing strategy, making Gigi Hadid, who has 15.5 million Instagram followers as of 2016, a brand ambassador. Now-a-days, Influencer marketing has grown as a fast expanding marketing strategy in many of the fashion industries as a result of the unheard-of increase in the number of social media influencers’ followers. With one of the study it has showed that, influencer marketing may provide a rate of influence that is 11x times greater than that of other traditional advertising channels. Due to this it have led fashion consumption on social sopping services.

3. Trends:
Because of relationship between social media and fashion it has become very common and part of daily life. Influencer marketing has become important as a necessity and critical component of advertising. Around 85% of American businesses are currently using influencer marketing as part of their marketing plan. Adopting fashion brands is a method to showcase oneself at social gatherings. Through their clothing, people try to demonstrate how unique and different they are. Some people who like to socially influence others with their fashion and style now have the possibility thanks to social media in the fashion sector. Those customers who buy fashion brands frequently follow fashion authorities on social media and heed their recommendations for purchasing fashion products.

4. Fashion campaigns:
Fashion companies enlarged in social media usage beyond advertisement to create a conversation and healthy bond with customers, allowing brands to have the opportunity to connect and develop relationships with customers through many different fashion campaigns. For example, Charlotte Russe has a successful social media campaign with a good following on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Their campaign highlighted “user-generated content and social engagement.” Marc by Marc Jacobs used social media for a worldwide model producing to showcase their new line. Marc used many models from Instagram that had the hash-tag #Marc and the campaign had almost 70,000 participants from around the world.

Conclusion:
In today’s era, social media has become a part of our globally connected world in numerous ways, and mostly the fashion industry is observing a major shift in its inspiration for designs and trends, all credits goes to social media and blogging sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. In the fashion industry, the application of social media platforms can be done to interact with the user, as a medium of networking with others in the industry, and as a way of building an online presence. But it is also found that social media can also influence designers in different ways that are changing the way many designers create their fashions.

References:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_in_the_fashion_industry
Social Media Influences on Fashion, Published Dec. 23, 2014, By Alyssa B. Sellors, https://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/social-media-influences-fashion
https://thefashionfrill.com/fashion/impact-of-social-media/
The Impact of Social Media on the Fashion Industry, by Iris Mohr, St. John’s University, PA

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Mazharul Islam Kiron

Founder & Editor of Textile Learner. He is a Textile Consultant, Blogger & Entrepreneur. He is working as a textile consultant in several local and international companies. He is also a contributor of Wikipedia.