For Vogue, New York Fashion Week will serve as an extension of its ongoing Facebook Live experimentation.
Vogue is leveraging its Vogue Runway vertical, launched last September to house fashion week-specific coverage, to continue testing Facebook Live content directly from fashion shows. Vogue Runway director Nicole Phelps said the primary difference in the section’s second year will be an increased emphasis on real-time coverage as opposed to its usual post-show analysis.
“In the past we’ve never really taken a live point of view, and our coverage has [been posted] after the show has started,” Phelps said. “We noticed through looking at numbers and going on social and across the web that people are engaged in the shows half an hour, even an hour, before the shows.”
Fellow publishers like Elle and Allure have been quick to jump on Facebook Live in recent months, primarily as a venue for featuring beauty and fitness tutorials. These posts have encouraged audience engagement by inviting viewers to submit questions for editors to ask interview subjects. Phelps said Vogue Runway will pull questions from the comment sections of its Facebook Live videos during behind-the-scenes interviews with the likes of Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Marc Jacobs, among others.
The video will also be repackaged for use on Vogue’s social media accounts, which Runway will take primary custody of during fashion week to cater to its 6 million followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Phelps noted she also plans to use 15-second runway teaser videos to headline web stories to give readers a more immersive visual experience.
In addition to the new web features, Vogue Runway also revamped its accompanying mobile app to be maximized for 360-degree and aerial images. Phelps said this will also include archived imagery and content from more than 12,000 shows since 2000, including couture and ready-to-wear shows.
“The app is like an encyclopedia of the last 16 years of shows now with the way it’s been updated, and you get a sense of that huge depth,” she said.
Phelps anticipates that this year will be “monumental” for the fashion industry, as select designers that have been adapting to the shifting fashion calendar and showing in-season fall lines rather than the quintessential spring apparel, transitions Runway aims to capture live.
“There’s probably other companies eager to get into Facebook Live game, but really our access is going to be unparalleled,” she said.
