While the wearable tech "watches" unveiled during New York Fashion Week-Apple Watch, Samsung's Gear S, and Intel/Opening Ceremony's MICA-appear not to be universal esthetic showstoppers, more impressive is the heavy embrace by fashion brands of digital innovation, especially social and mobile.
Filtered for social tech discussions, the NetBase NYFW topic analysis below reveals a high thematic interest in the convergence of fashion and tech. In fact, this month's global fashion week events all have as core themes dedicated social and mobile perspectives.
From biometric wearable tech garments (Ralph Lauren's t-shirts launched during the U.S. Open), tech fashion accessories (Rebecca Minkoff, Tory Burch), to social channels and apps, the fashion industry is entering a new era of "wearables." Both sides of the burgeoning wearables industry are positioning for early adopter market share, but speculation runs high as to whether and when such wearables will surmount current cheap-looking ugly trinkets with incidental functionality and acquire viable mass market appeal.
An IDC study predicts 19.2 million wearables are estimated to ship worldwide in 2014, more than tripling last year's sales. By 2018, shipments are expected to top 112 million. As for style, in pursuit of fashion "haut tech," maybe it will take further iterations of Apple Watch collaborations with fashion designers to set a new esthetic standard to match its tech elegance.
With designers from over 12 countries showcasing their Spring 2015 lines at NYFW, FotoYapp launched to enable users, both at Fashion Week and around the world to engage in their own native language with most major forms of social media, instantly. FotoYapp's rich features globalize social media content for brands, designers, models, media outlets and more.
Even couture brands, having overcome their initial reticence to embrace social, fearing brand dilution or cannibalizing, now stream their runway shows on channels like Pluto.TV, with shows viewable either on the Pluto.tv smartphone app or other streaming channel. New apps and mobile platforms allow brands such as Burberry, Chanel and Dior to stream their runway shows, capture interest in a design and fulfill orders right from the runway.
Non-fashion brands too, are optimizing branding opportunities during large scale international events like NYFW, using a variety of apps, mobile platforms and social campaigns to tie in mobile-centric campaigns-AccuWeather's MinuteCast (sponsoring fashion photographer Nigel Barker), Clorox's Smart Sleek Bleach (with Vine), Uber and Glamsquad (promo code Uberglam gets you a great hair/beauty deal), among others. Also launched during NYFW, Yahoo Style has hit the runway, set to walk the global Fashion Month catwalk and beyond.
Other fashion apps recently launched or imminent are Popsugar, Hyperlapse, Spring, Tinker Tailor and Somebody, among many more to come. Some of the apps are designed to provide runway and street style material for inspiration (Popsugar), similar to Instagram and Pinterest. While others provide a mobile commerce platform for designers (Spring); celebrity influence platform (Farfetch Discover); design customization (Tinker Tailor); or really simple fashion video editing for journalists and content managers (Instagram's time-lapse video app (Hyperlapse). Several of these show considerable traction among NYFW attendees in the NetBase tech filtered Fashion Week hashtag analysis below.
Perhaps a first for a fashion label, Tommy Hilfiger, created a digital influencer strategy for his NYFW show, inviting a group of digital influencers from outside the fashion industry to provide a new lens on his collection in the debut of his "First-Timers" program, hosted onsite at NYFW.
Department store chains, too, are walking the digital marketing walk. No stranger to omnichannel strategies, Macy's is targeting mobile and Gen Y, and during NYFW sponsored Fashion Rocks, with its own live shopping experience and another though Shazam app. In a first attempt to build an interactive community, Saks Fifth Avenue launched "fanreel" during NYFW to encourage shopper interaction.
If you are not of the bricks or mortar world, materializing during NYFW is a cinch-think of a TaskRabbit.com man with van. Digital commerce players Zappos, for instance, parks (literally) across the street from Lincoln Center, where Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week is happening, albeit not in a MB vehicle.
Yet, for all the digital innovation underway in the fashion industry, a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, "Fashion on Phones," claims the industry has a long way to go in mobile. The study shows a big gulf in the mobile readiness of the Women's Wear Daily official list of "Top 100 Fashion Brands" - revealing that nearly one in five of the leading apparel, technology and high-fashion brands lacks a mobile optimized site, including DKNY, Reebok and Versace.
Hoping to bridge this gap in New York City, arguably the fashion capital of the world, is a public-private partnership, NY Fashion Tech Lab, an accelerator program that aims to dramatically increase the number of fashion industry jobs in New York City, where only 6% of jobs are in fashion. Overall, the U.S. apparel industry is the largest in the world, about 28%, which equates to $331 billion.
Bottom line: Haut-tech may have a long way to go. But the runway is calling social and mobile innovators.