The Importance of Utilising Fashion Trends for Search

I attended London fashion Weekend on Saturday, it is my first year of attendance and from now on I will be going without a doubt every season.

London Fashion Weekend follows on straight from London Fashion Week, which is only open to people within the Fashion industry and is not only difficult but near impossible to acquire tickets to the fashion shows, with the likes of Bora Aksu, Erdem and Basso & Brooke showing their collections to name just a few.

This was not as exclusive an event as usual because of the use of digital for fashion designers. This was the first year that LFW designer catwalk shows were streamed live online, London being the first to do such a thing. Not all of the shows but a substantial amount and some of the best, which included Burberry Prorsum in 3D. I happened to catch a few of the shows, which all had a countdown to the start time and a little key on the right hand side of the page where it showed what time each show would start. But fashion being fashion they were mostly late.

The stream was actually very clear as you can see from the below screen shot taken from Burberry Prorsum.

Source: London Fashion Week TV

This was a real breakthrough for the British Fashion Council to be involved in creating the first ever live streaming, of course I am sure it didn’t go down to well with some of fashion’s elite who literally tore off a limb to get an invite for front row! And we get to see it with no limb tearing involved.

LFW over the past couple of seasons has been trying to become more digital by bringing in bloggers to give live updates on their blogs straight from the front row. Commissioning in some cases bloggers to come backstage and watch the whole experience and take photos from start to finish. It’s pretty impressive to be asked to get involved in that way, but it often comes with a price, for example some bloggers are being asked to document the designer’s collections but to only write what they ask them to write to make the designers collection a hit online, this is obviously a very clever way of building an online presence and if you get into the right fashion blogging community it won’t stop with just one blog talking about you either, which means more link’s back to your site and more of an online presence.

Twitter is fast becoming an important channel of communications for fashion, as it is in lots of other industries. People on the front row were complaining about lack of feeling in their thumbs after tweeting at such a fast pace about the next season’s trends to come.

The ever growing micro blogging service is also being used by designers to get ideas from followers, Stefano Gabbana of Dolce & Gabbana as an example tweeted he will “accept suggestions on Women’s collection…(just 2day)”. It seems using digital to find ideas for a fashion collection is a little farfetched but may have worked for some designers. Only if I had an idea for a Women’s wear collection I doubt I’d give it to someone to pass off as their own somehow.

In my opinion it is so important to know your trends if you’re working on a fashion client, not only so you can optimise well in advance, specifically targeting the key trends for each season -but so you can actually be seen as an expert in Fashion SEO.

The new season is showcased at London Fashion Week 6 months in advance, this means you have at least 4 months to crack on with your optimisation around the keywords you expect to start trending. You won’t only be ahead of the game, you will be at the top of it!

All photos are courtesy of Jo-ann Hodgson.