Social media is in flux. In the last five years, we’ve seen Twitter tank, TikTok explode onto the scene and then almost get banned (twice) in the US, its fate still unclear, and major algorithm changes at Instagram that have made reach unreliable. Some may argue change is the nature of the game: “I started working on the internet in 1990, and since then I’ve watched Microsoft try to be AOL, AOL try to be Yahoo, Yahoo try to be Google, Google try to be Facebook, and Facebook try and succeed at being Snapchat and Instagram, by buying Instagram and copying Snapchat. And then TikTok is one of the most interesting stories in the history of humanity. TikTok is like opium,” says Ian Rogers, who moved from Apple to LVMH in 2015, to be chief digital officer, a role he maintained until 2020 (he is now chief experience officer at crypto company Ledger).
As platforms continue to develop and innovate, the way audiences engage with social media evolves, too. In turn, fashion and beauty brands have been along for the ride, changing tack, shifting strategies and reallocating budgets to follow audiences and creators wherever they may go, vying for eyeballs and engagements, and increasingly relying on social platforms for sales conversions (with varying degrees of success). “Brands are always late. When in the history of the internet has it been brands first, then users? Users always lead, then there’s a critical mass and brands enter,” says Rogers.
And as technology develops, changes and evolutions in the fashion social media landscape have become faster and more concentrated.
So where have we been, what did we learn and where are we now? Here, Vogue Business breaks down the key moments in the history of social and how they affected fashion and beauty marketing, and predictions from experts about what’s to come.
The 2000s
At the dawn of the millennium, the term social network had barely entered the daily lexicon. And social media as we know it today did not yet exist. We were still carrying flip phones with fuzzy cameras; listening to MP3 players; and blogs — for many, the first form of fashion social media — were in their infancy.
Throughout the 2000s, bloggers slowly infiltrated the fashion and beauty landscape, and we saw the launch of many major social media platforms that still exist today. In 2005, the social media influencer was born on platforms like YouTube, recommending products via beauty and style tutorials.
“Social media wasn’t even a thing when I first started Tarte out of my tiny NYC apartment in 1999,” says Tarte founder and CEO Maureen Kelly. “As soon as social media started bubbling up in the early 2000s — think MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — I saw it as this amazing new way to continue building our community. While it wasn’t part of the OG blueprint, it quickly became one of our most powerful marketing tools — it’s about meeting our customers where they are and building meaningful relationships.”
2000
Early fashion and beauty bloggers began using platform LiveJournal and niche forums to share their looks, style tips and DIY fashion advice. The earliest fashion blog on LiveJournal is thought to be Fashin, a sub-blog of celebrity gossip platform Oh No They Didn’t, which was known for acerbic fashion commentary.
“Blogs were my earliest memory of social media,” says PR guru Lucien Pagès, founder of Lucien Pagès Communication. “Before, there were other platforms, but they weren’t on our radar. It was more for the kids to connect with each other.”
2001
After JLo appeared on the Grammys red carpet in a jungle print Versace dress in February 2000, it became the most popular search query on Google to date. But the platform didn’t yet have functionality to show image results in response to search. Responding to the JLo moment, Google Images was born in February 2001. That year, 250 million images were indexed in Image Search. This grew to one billion by 2005 and over 10 billion images by 2010, according to the platform. But there still wasn’t a social media platform for brands to share their images in a more curated way.
2002
Blogging platform Blogger gained traction, with early blogs including fashion diary favourite She She Me, product recommendation blog Primp and menswear style blog Daily Fashion report building followings. While these early blogs established the blogosphere, brands did not engage with bloggers directly until the late 2000s.
2003
With custom profile layouts, music integration and photo albums, MySpace was an early platform for fashion self-expression and online identity curation, giving rise to online subcultures around music and style. MySpace was adopted by a handful of luxury labels, including Alexander McQueen diffusion line McQ, which launched a brand page to share campaigns, but it wasn t adopted as a fashion or beauty marketing tool despite its dominance in the early 2000s social media landscape.
“I remember realising that MySpace was going to be big because initially it was just this thing my music nerd friends were using,” says ex-LVMH exec Rogers, who was VP and general manager of music at Yahoo in the early noughties. “Then, one day, I walked into my home office and my daughter Claire — who is now 35 — and her friend were on my computer. I said, ‘Claire, what are you doing on my computer?’ She’s like, ‘I’m checking my MySpace.’ I went back to work at Yahoo the next day and said, ‘Guys, this MySpace thing is going to be huge.’ Because once you go from the nerds to the 13-year-olds, it’s over.”
A testament to the power of the blog.
2004
It marked the shift to mainstream culture.
Yambao blogged from his parents’ home in Manila, the Philippines.
The platform began as a means for Harvard students to rate one another, and was eventually opened to students from other universities and colleges from 2004 to 2005. It was then opened to the public in 2006, hitting mass adoption thereafter.
2005
At its peak, the platform had 300 million registered users.
YouTube laid the foundations for the influencer economy, giving rise to relatable, educational video content.
Founded by entrepreneurs Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the online forum allowed users to anonymously ask questions or offer opinions and information. Initial user growth was slow, but following an acquisition from Condé Nast in 2006, the platform began to gain traction. (Reddit is now an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast parent company Advance Publications.) Some fast fashion brands adopted the platform in the 2010s, including Uniqlo, H&M and Urban Outfitters. Reddit lends itself more readily to user-generated content (UGC) over brand activity, though that might be about to change.
2006
Launched in March 2006, Twitter was a unique proposition, with a 140-character text limit and a focus on more frequent, less considered posting. It would become a key broadcast tool for journalists and bloggers in the fashion and beauty sphere.
In September 2006, the platform opened to those over 13 years old with a valid email address. It spread like wildfire, taking audience share away from MySpace.
The video platform had an estimated 50 million active users when it was acquired by Google in October 2006, for $1.65 billion. In the move, Google acquired YouTube’s 46 per cent share of online video traffic.
2007
With the launch of the iPhone, fashion journalists and creators began documenting fashion shows with photos and videos, shared initially on blogs and magazine websites.
Influencing became a viable career choice for creators around the globe, as they could suddenly be paid directly by platforms for high-performing content.
2008
Brands including Urban Outfitters, Sephora, Mac Cosmetics, L’Oréal and Maybelline began engaging with creators on YouTube, gifting products to review and creating brand tutorials and how-tos. Popular beauty and style vloggers included Michelle Phan, Blair Fowler (JuicyStar07) and Bethany Mota (MacBarbie07).
Lookbook.nu was a website where users could post their looks to be seen by a mass audience. “You could post your outfits no matter who you were, where you lived and people could vote on them. Essentially, it coincided with the hipster era, very American Apparel coded,” says cultural commentator Trey Taylor, who started his fashion blog in 2008 and became entrenched in fashion’s early online era, before covering celebrity and internet culture for publications like Vogue and The New York Times (he’s since founded fragrance label Serviette). “I think it was the first time that UGC of outfits specifically was a thing. Everybody was always posting on their own blogs, whether it was The Blonde Salad (Chiara Ferragni) or Style Rookie or Style Bubble or whatever, but there wasn’t a democratic place for it.”
“There was a lot of animosity on LiveJournal when Marc released the bag,” Taylor says. “It was funny like that because everyone was anonymous on there, sometimes people would be saying things on there and users would come out of the woodwork like, ‘Hey, that’s me!’”
2009
A first for the industry, the attendance incited a media frenzy and ruffled feathers among the fashion elite. That discomfort was a sign of the change to come.
Early 2010s
Upon the launch of Instagram, the early 2010s saw social media enter the fray in a big way. Instagram was the first visual social media platform to hit the mainstream and came to revolutionise the fashion landscape forever. “Shows had been on the internet before there was social media. Victoria’s Secret put one of its shows on Broadcast.com in 1999. D&G streamed shows from 2004 onwards. Alexander McQueen streamed his first show in 2009 with ShowStudio,” Vogue Business chief international correspondent Luke Leitch says. “The difference with social media was that it allowed the audience to present their take and imagery from the shows in real time, and that really widened the aperture.”
The fashion industry, however, was less concerned with the democratisation of fashion through social media, and more concerned with the rise of bloggers, who were free agents rising the ranks and rapidly building social media profiles even bigger than their blogs, says Alison Bringé, CMO of Launchmetrics, who worked at IMG in the 2000s.
“We were kind of just getting online and fashion was becoming democratised, for better or for worse. I remember that conversation happening a lot,” adds cultural commentator Trey Taylor. “[One editor] said, ‘Fashion Week is a trade show, and only people who are invited to a trade show should go to the trade show. Imagine it’s like a dentist convention; dentists go, not bloggers.’ Blah blah blah.”
But brands learnt quickly that to understand social media, they had to work with the bloggers, not against them. “They were translating trends, converting sales, and, most importantly, connecting with their audiences via Instagram, through content that was highly authentic, highly personal, and soon heavily leaned on video,” says Larissa Gargaro, Meta’s fashion partnerships manager for North America.
2010
A visual mood-boarding platform, Pinterest provided fashion inspiration, though it didn’t immediately take off as a brand marketing tool. Some brands and retailers, including Nordstrom, Etsy and Kate Spade created Pinterest boards between 2011 and 2012, so users could discover their imagery and link through to their sites.
“New York Fashion Week was always more commercial and more of a marketing machine, so it was one of the earliest fashion weeks to engage with different social media platforms,” says Bringé, who was responsible for the digitisation of NYFW while working at organiser IMG. The lobby at the NYFW venue in September 2010 featured a Twitter wall featuring all the tweets that mentioned the event. “At that time, all of these things were being done by people that had no experience in social media — because nobody did. I’m sure if we could go back in time and look at those social assets now we’d be horrified. It was probably really raw and unpolished, but it was an exciting moment. There were all these opportunities to create buzz and new ways and to reach new audiences. It was like the Wild West. There was no right or wrong way to do it.”
Around this time, brands began cautiously adopting Twitter. “There were some that were suspicious,” says Leitch. “I remember once hearing someone from Chanel say the brand would never sell online, and that kind of sums up the attitude of ‘old luxury’, at least at first, to social media. Others really embraced it, though. This was a time of experimentation and nobody really knew if new products and platforms were going to last or not.”
Most major luxury fashion brands joined Instagram in 2011, including Burberry and Gucci, though some didn’t join until 2013. Burberry’s first post on Instagram was a mix of stills and behind-the-scenes content from a shoot on Brighton Beach.
“Instagram was really created by the people for the people, and it wasn’t really integrated from a brand perspective and used as a tool for marketing until a bit later on,” says Gia Kuan of New York PR agency Gia Kuan Consulting. “On the communication side, we’ve seen a ginormous shift because it’s become so prominent in terms of how a brand is measuring its success and how its story is told. In marketing, the word community exploded because of social media.”
“It was kind of like proto TikTok,” says cultural commentator Taylor, “the photographer Justin Woo would get 20 of the hottest models lip-syncing to a popular song every fashion week. It would be a huge part of fashion online.”
2011
The multimedia platform allowed for messaging, social media and payments. Luxury fashion brands largely started engaging in WeChat from the mid-2010s onward, to target Chinese consumers.
“The first I remember of a brand going all-in [on social media] was Christopher Bailey who was a digital nerd, and the first to live stream Burberry to the world from a tent in Kensington Gardens,” says Vogue chief critic Sarah Mower. “That changed everything — unless you were in your seat by your appointed time, you were locked out. The young Brit actors, models and music people in the front row then became part of the spectacle. That was a big shift.”
Twitch’s partnership with a luxury fashion brand wasn’t until 2020, when Burberry streamed its SS21 show on the platform, though streetwear brands like Champion and Anti Social Social Club had already engaged with Twitch and its Gen Z audience by creating exclusive collections with Twitch streamers.
Primarily used as a communication platform between friends, by 2012, Snapchat — a disappearing photo and video messaging app — reached 40,000 active users in its first year. Fashion brands were slow to adopt the platform, but some labels including Gucci and Prada created their own filters between 2019 and 2020. As of 2025, Snapchat has 453 million daily active users, dominated by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, but it remains a platform primarily for communication over commerce or entertainment.
Editors, buyers and fans contributed content to the Oscar de la Renta Tumblr page by tagging their posts with #ODLRLIVE, showing off their outfits and where they were tuning in from.
2012
“The dot-com bubble was around ’98 or ’99, then it exploded and you had this trough of disillusionment, before steady growth from 2002 onwards,” says Rogers. “It takes 10 to 15 years for ideas to reach the mainstream. Over the 2000s, we got MySpace, then Facebook, then the iPhone and then by 2012 stats [began to] show the critical mass of scrolling.”
“I got Instagram in 2012, but it wasn’t so ‘fashion’,” says PR guru Pagès. “We were photographing flowers and stuff like that, and getting 10 likes. It didn’t explode until around 2015.”
The subsequent scaling of Instagram under Facebook’s ownership opened up opportunities for fashion brands to engage.
He took over Balmain in 2011 at the age of 25.
2013
Twitter had acquired Vine in October 2012 for a reported $30 million prior to its launch. Built on lo-fi comedy content, Vine and YouTube nurtured a new, sillier corner of the internet. Vine’s heyday was largely before luxury brands started to engage with social media in significant ways, especially as a short-form video platform primarily used for humorous content. The platform shut down in 2017 due to a lack of monetisation tools and competition.
The acquisition has since been considered one of the factors that contributed to Tumblr’s downfall, with the changes Yahoo implemented leading to user dissatisfaction.
The launch of video transformed Instagram from primarily a photo-sharing app into a more dynamic and engaging platform.
The platform — which is described as a mixture of TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest — has become the top destination for luxury fashion content in China.
Burberry posted a short video teaser for its Spring/Summer 2014 menswear show on Instagram, shortly after the platform introduced video-sharing capabilities.
Gucci’s first major Instagram campaign in September 2013 starred long-time brand ambassador and model Charlotte Casiraghi in a shoot entitled ‘The Woman Who Horses Love’. It was part of the brand’s ‘Icons of Heritage’ series. The images featured Casiraghi surrounded by horses, dogs and Gucci bags.
This update led to the first sponsored posts on the platform — Michael Kors being the first fashion brand to use paid ads in November 2013, promoting a women’s watch. “Before paid ads, it was hard to measure results on social media. What you could do with social media was also so limited and also really focused on the US market,” says Sian Van der Muelen, founder of talent agency Totem Worldwide, who worked at global communications firm Edelman on the Topshop account in the 2010s. “Paid ads were a slow rollout. At Edelman, as an agency, we didn’t get access to a lot of those functions until much later. First, I think they started off with big brand names, so it was Procter Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nike.”
2014
The first trip was with just two bloggers, Chiara Ferragni (The Blonde Salad) and Julie Sariñana (Sincerely Jules). “Back in the day, [when you went on a trip] you’d take a picture from your camera, print it out and frame it. I took the same concept, but instead, Instagram would be a place to house all these images and experiences,” says Raissa Gerona, who is currently chief brand officer at Revolve but was VP of brand marketing when she pitched the idea. “We matched the influencer, the products, the experience and the importance of sharing it all on social media. That didn’t exist before we did it. It completely took over everyone’s feed and the rest is history.”
Around 2014, brands started to see Instagram as an extension of their brand worlds, says Marc Jacobs director of social and editorial content Brooke McCord. “They were very much posting these mood boards, and it was exciting. It felt like a more intimate look into these brands that you admired, and things that had previously been a little bit inaccessible. The exciting part was that brands weren’t selling products on Instagram back then, it was more about building this lore and mythology around the brand and starting to test out new aesthetic codes,” she says.
The platform was primarily used for lip-syncing, short-form videos popular among teenagers.
Late 2010s
By the late 2010s, social media was firmly cemented in most luxury brand strategies, with the influencer at the centre. “By the time I got to LVMH in 2015, e-commerce was only 3 per cent of total business, but the brands were already very good at social media,” says ex-chief digital officer Rogers. “Fashion shows were happening on YouTube, they had growing followers on Instagram, we were starting to get some tools for managing ambassadors online.”
The bloggers became influencers, and were suddenly crucial to reaching audiences at home. “People were obsessed with bloggers being the new world because it was juicy to say, ‘The old world is going to the second row and the new world is coming to the front row.’ But for me, it was not that,” says PR guru Pagès. “When we started to seat shows with content creators, we had to seat them to be sure that everyone could see the show. It was, strategically, about seating people so they could film.”
With a mainstream embrace of influencers in the fashion world, there was a shift in mindset within brands’ own marketing strategies. “By 2016, brands were finally not only working with creators, they were also thinking like creators,” says Meta’s Gargaro. “The content was more approachable in production quality, it was native to the language of the internet and felt a bit more fluent and fun. The results are that the content was more appealing and valuable for the customer.”
“The first time we blew up on YouTube in 2016, our Shape Tape concealer had just launched, and suddenly, creators were calling it their holy grail. We couldn’t keep it in stock. That moment really showed us how powerful peer-to-peer recommendation was,” says Tarte founder and CEO Kelly.
From here on out, the speed of the internet began to shape how brands showed up. Simon Whitehouse, who was CEO of JW Anderson from 2014 to 2018, highlights the velocity and increased exposure to fashion that social media has allowed, which can negatively impact designers. “Twenty years ago, the big maisons were not followed with this type of scrutiny or pressure — a creative might be affected by the opinion of an extremely experienced critic, but there’s only about 10 of them in the world and the shows were this exclusive thing that nobody else saw until the images came out months later in a print magazine,” Whitehouse says. “The consequential effect with social media is this intensity and scrutiny and pressure, because the immediacy of social media has created a tabloid nature in the industry.”
2015
As publishers began to feature their content on the Discover page, brands were able to dip their toes in by engaging through them.
The designer catapulted the brand to success with use of Instagram during his tenure.
Top beauty YouTubers such as Desi Perkins and Patrick Starrr were in attendance. “It’s wild to think about now, but those early Tarte trips helped define influencer marketing as we know it,” says Kelly, highlighting elements of the model such as personalised room drops, intimate dinners, themed evening events, as well as pre-trip and post-trip PR packages to keep the momentum alive. “We treated creators like collaborators, not just content engines, and proved that immersive moments could rival — or outdo — traditional media spend.” In more recent years, Tarte has invited customers on those trips, too.
The invite-only platform allows users to connect through text, voice and video chat, and became popular for communities who share interests like gaming or music. Fashion brands didn’t start using it until around 2022, when the likes of Gucci and Adidas launched Discord servers for their tech enthusiast communities to drum up hype around their NFT projects.
The brand showcased its cruise 2016 show on the platform. “Around this time is when brands like Louis Vuitton, Tiffany Co and Chanel were starting their campaigns on Snapchat,” says Geoffrey Perez, director and global head of luxury at Snap, who joined the company in 2016, initially working in sales. “The campaigns were pretty basic, but in a way it was bold for brands to use a format that’s a full-screen video on a mobile-only format. That’s how people express themselves on Snapchat and that’s how we wanted brands to communicate, in a way that felt native to the format.”
“They really captured the attention of Snapchat users at the time, who were younger millennials and older Gen Zs,” says Perez. “I remember the excitement about a format that felt so natural for mobile. A lot of brands started to resize assets to make bespoke tailored content for Snapchat, which was one of the earliest examples of innovation with video formats [on social] but also with augmented reality. It was a way for brands to showcase their universes in a different way.”
Around this time, brands including Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Sephora were adding geolocation 2D filters to their Snapchat stores, too. “Because Snapchat is used to communicate with your friends, if you’re shopping somewhere and you get an exclusive filter at that location, you could take a snap and show your friend where you were without having to say anything,” says Perez.
2016
“We organised it in like 10 days, it was nuts,” says Whitehouse, the brand’s CEO at the time. “The shows every six months are always the highest point of communication, but how do you fill the hollowness in the meantime? We really felt the speed of consumption was changing. The idea came up while we were developing the JW Anderson workshops, which were these cultural activations that also had a big social media component. Part of the strategy was the velocity of the digital strategy that we were doing, it took it to a different stratosphere.”
“I remember the party was absolutely rammed, everyone was jammed together, and it was super fun,” says Vogue Business’s Leitch. “We ate dinner overlooking the Piazza del Duomo and among other things the table talked about the practicalities of boosting your follower count. I remember Alexa Chung and Karlie Kloss were particularly pro when it came to knowing the ins and outs of Instagram — and so was Kevin Systrom, of course.”
The platform launched an algorithm that optimised the order of posts on users’ feeds.
The new feature encouraged daily use of the platform.
The channel was initially used to promote its Mr Burberry fragrance. “Burberry was really one of the first to tackle Snapchat in an innovative way,” says Perez. “Discover was new for brands and publishers: every other platform showed the most recent post at the top of your feed, and Snapchat was the opposite, so it was a totally different way of telling a story, on top of being vertical and mobile only. This was a turning point for mobile adoption.”
Facebook put a bid in to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in October 2013, but the offer was rejected. While Snapchat’s stories were more intimate, designed for users to update friends and family, Instagram’s opened a gateway for brands to have more immediate connections with audiences. “The Instagram Stories launch was something that opened the gates for a behaviour shift in digital marketing,” says Meta’s Gargaro.
The platform would soon shape the future of marketing for brands everywhere.
The show was live streamed from the runway to social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter.
2017
“By the late 2010s, we had seen the explosion of the influencer. If you knew how to market yourself, you could really be self-made and monetise off this to be completely independent and earn more than someone working an office job,” says publicist Kuan. “For brands, this was before Instagram’s shopping tab, so it wasn’t so much about direct sales, but more a way of storytelling, especially to feature images of celebrities wearing your products.”
2018
The brand had been slower to the social media game, having only set up its account in late 2016. “When Hedi joined Celine, the Instagram account became this beautiful space for black and white photography with minimal text in the captions. It was all about his fascination with youth, culture, and grunge and subculture. You started getting not only a look into the brands in question, but also a lot of the creative directors working behind the scenes at those brands as well, which felt really exciting,” says Marc Jacobs’s McCord.
“The first Jacquemus show we did outside of Paris was ‘Le Gadjo’. We only invited 11 guests to travel, because Jacquemus didn’t have so much money back then, and they were all classic journalists. The amplification came through Instagram,” says Pagès. “I remember we didn’t have a connection on the beach so we were running up the hill. The images were so instagrammable and it became a viral moment.”
Simon Porte Jacquemus has often been dubbed Instagram’s favourite fashion designer. “He was always so good at social media — people were responding to what he put out before they could even identify why,” says Kuan. “It’s not so much that he was using Instagram itself, but there was a form of repetition: he was using lo-fi content shot on an iPhone that felt real, he was one of the first to do the three-grid repetition, there were micro bits of movement so the images weren’t still — and we’re now learning that reels perform better than stills.”
The acquisition marked a further shift towards short-form content. Ex-LVMH exec Rogers refers to the market trend called ‘death in the middle’. “If you’d have told people that the internet was going to drive people to three-hour Joe Rogan podcasts, nobody would have believed you. But we got rid of the 30-minute sitcom and now we have the 15-hour series on Netflix or the three-second cat video on TikTok,” he says of the phenomenon.
2019
The feature allowed users to buy directly without leaving the app. “Once brands were able to integrate and sell products through Instagram Shop, and later TikTok Shop, people started to really put their dollars into advertising there,” says Kuan. “Now, if we’re pitching a story to a publication, we’re also probably asking for email and social integration — it’s a package because the client themselves might not move the needle enough without social media.”
The platform added catalogues and shopping ads, which allowed users to pin products and brands to upload their full offerings to Pinterest. “The [platform] I feel doesn’t get enough love, but it’s critical for fashion brands, is Pinterest,” says Launchmetrics’s Bringé. “The interesting thing with Pinterest is around 80 per cent of searches start unbranded, which is a great opportunity. Any brand that has great keyword tagging through their Pinterest can be easily discovered and then shopped through Pinterest and Google.”
The maison partnered with Snapchat on a filter that allowed users to virtually try on a digital version of its Keepall bag using augmented reality (AR). “You could scan a card and then see the digital bag next to the real one. That was a big moment because for the past few years we had mainly worked with beauty and accessories brands, so we were building the muscle of crafting 3D. The audience was growing up as well, they weren’t teenagers anymore. When Covid hit, the AR elements allowed us to bring luxury into people’s lives through AR 3D renderings,” says Snap’s Perez.
The brand created the #TBChallenge for TikTok, encouraging audiences to create its TB monogram with their hands alongside a TB filter.
Before TikTok’s pandemic surge, Celine creative director Slimane made headlines, casting the first TikTok star in a luxury campaign. Eubanks, known for lip-syncing and dancing on the platform, opened the door for scores more TikTokers to enter the luxury sphere.
2020 to present
A lot has changed, quickly, from 2020 through to today. The pandemic arguably made social media more essential than ever, as a means of connection and entertainment. The biggest disruptor — TikTok — blew up during Covid and has in many ways upended the social media landscape.
Incumbents rushed to create a TikTok rival, giving rise to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Suddenly, a high follower count was not the only requirement for content to soar. Luxury brands shifted from polished content to more lo-fi, UGC-style videos in order to align with audiences.
“2020 was the Wild West for [brand] social content,” Marc Jacobs’s McCord says. “There was definitely that period of adaptation where [brands] were trying to work out how to speak to people who were trapped at home and needing entertainment, inspiration and light relief.” It shifted the way brands use lots of platform features, she says. “I remember that time where every brand was trying to do a live DJ set or a cook-a-long live stream. There was a sense of rawness to [content] during the pandemic, a sense of urgency, a sense of community that you could find online.”
“TikTok is actually more of an entertainment platform than a social media platform,” says Loewe CMO Charlie Smith, who has led the brand into a social-first era in which it embraces internet speak and viral micro-trends. “So the primary objective for us was to be as entertaining as possible, then to find a way to factor in brand and product as well.”
Many, though, are still figuring out how to shift from high-touch, curated editorial content to that which is more suited to a given platform. “It’s still quite common for brands to go into that TikTok space and be repurposing brand ‘above the line’ content, or just doing like a behind-the-scenes add-on to something that’s already happening,” McCord says. “The interesting way to think about social content is to think natively.”
2020
The app was downloaded 693 million times in 2019 and 850 million times the following year, according to Sprout Social. CeCe Vu, who was head of fashion and beauty partnerships at TikTok at the time (and now leads creator strategy and partnerships at Apple Services), says this was the moment brands began to see that signing up to TikTok didn’t mean losing control. “During 2020, as the world slowed down, many brands finally had the time to take a closer look,” she recalls. “They joined educational sessions with us, connected with our creators and began to understand that Gen Z wasn’t just watching from the sidelines. They were actively shaping fashion’s story.”
D’amelio, the most-followed person on TikTok at the time, attended Prada’s AW20 show, becoming one of the first TikTokers to attend fashion week.
The photo-sharing app gained traction for its candid nature. Users were notified once a day at a randomised time, during which they were instructed to snap two photos: one front-facing selfie, and one back-facing photo of their current environment.
The social audio app boomed during the pandemic, as users sat in on sessions about topics ranging from then uber-popular — but still nascent — NFTs to politics and sports. (And, of course, fashion and beauty.)
Following TikTok’s boom, Meta launched Reels on Instagram to compete. At that point, most brands were yet to start engaging with TikTok meaningfully, or were in the very early stages, so Instagram’s launch forced them to consider how they show up in the short-form video space. “The launch of Reels in 2020 was followed by the beginning of a new era in which luxury brands started adapting internet-native visual languages into their digital marketing communications, and we saw the new era of fashion film. Black and white conceptual and horizontal photography gave way to vertical, entertaining images that were shot with a phone, and being playful became almost a rule in such videos,” says Meta’s Gargaro.
Balmain was the first brand to stream its 75th-anniversary show live on the platform. “[Creative director] Olivier Rousteing was truly ahead of his time. He saw the opportunity for Balmain to connect with a younger, global audience through a fresher lens,” says Vu, who led fashion and beauty partnerships at TikTok from 2019 to 2022. “It didn’t take much convincing,” she adds, “he understood what TikTok could offer.” Louis Vuitton, Boss, Gucci, Moncler and Fendi also launched accounts the same year.
The bulk of luxury brands followed suit. But in the early days, luxury brands were posting polished content on TikTok. “Honestly, [our] first posts really weren’t very good,” says Loewe’s Smith. “When we first started posting, we were posting some things that we were also posting on Instagram Reels, so they were too polished looking and they just didn’t really get that much engagement. They were too abstract as well, too art directed.” (Many brands still fall into this trap today.) This was the hardest part of getting brands on board, Vu says: getting them to let go of old habits. “Many luxury houses were used to controlling every aspect of their image, so giving creators creative freedom felt risky” she recalls.
As Instagram did with Reels, YouTube launched its short-form video content feature as a TikTok competitor.
Titled ‘The Future of Fashion’, the event featured brand speakers discussing both sustainability and innovation.
2021
As brands piled onto TikTok and continued to activate on Instagram, Facebook and more, luxury label Bottega Veneta decided to buck the trend completely, deactivating all its social media accounts. The brand never spoke on the decision, but experts saw the sense in it. “Maybe the ultimate luxury in this new phygital world is actually logging off, erasing all traces of one’s digital footprint, and trying to inhabit a purely three-dimensional space,” Steff Yotka, who was a Vogue editor at the time (and is now global editorial director of i-D magazine), wrote in response to the news.
In January, Dior launched audio event series ‘Beauty Beyond’, highlighting beauty trends as well as its product launches. The following month, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) hosted a series of roundtables on diversity in fashion and the impact of the pandemic on designers. But by September, Clubhouse’s active user count was at approximately 3.5 million, significantly down on March 2021’s 10 million peak.
Telfar TV was a a 24-hour public-access channel, viewable on a Telfar TV website and app, outside of traditional social platforms.
2022
Balenciaga, Thom Browne and Prada all supplied digital outfits upon launch, which could be purchased by users to clothe their Meta avatars. Valentino followed suit in 2023.
The feature allowed brands to connect with creators for partnerships and campaigns. After an initial trial phase, the tool expanded to new markets in February 2024, including Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Japan, India and Brazil. “It’s a way for brands to discover emerging creators on our platform,” says Meta’s Gargaro. “It also benefits creators because they don’t need an agent to work with these brands.”
A first for brands — with a format less polished than even TikTok — Elf got creative with its approach. “We put it in the hands of interns,” says Elf Beauty’s chief brand officer Laurie Lam. “We passed that account around to different people that worked at Elf, so that you can actually get an inside look of not only the holder, but of Elf [HQ].”
This led to a brand engagement drop-off, with Balenciaga leaving the platform entirely in November.
The rise of short-form video revolutionised fashion show content and coverage, while having a major effect on brand strategies post-pandemic. Coperni’s spray-on dress during its SS23 show (in October 2022), became one of fashion’s defining viral moments. Media titles including Vogue, i-D and Dazed shifted strategy to focus on celebrity content at fashion shows, which drove higher engagement from a mass audience on TikTok and Reels. In turn, brands shifted strategy to engineer viral moments, or curate A-list front rows for maximum reach, incorporating Hollywood actors, athletes, K-pop stars, as well as music and acting talents from Thailand and Türkiye with die-hard fan bases.
“TikTok is different, because you cannot just film the show and post it,” says PR guru Pagès. “Content became more about the behind the scenes, interviewing people on the front row, or showing your preparation, depending on your function in the industry. [Brands and creators] began going beyond the show itself to create a narrative.”
2023
This was the year brands started to come on board the newsletter platform, which allows authors to self-publish newsletters and send them directly to audience inboxes. Meg Strachan, founder and CEO of lab-grown jewellery brand Dorsey, launched her newsletter What I Put On Today in January 2023, while Tory Burch started her own, titled What Should I Wear?, in August.
Threads hit over 100 million users within five days (but momentum has since slowed). Continuing its history of being a first-mover, Elf joined Threads shortly after the app’s launch, alongside brands including Rare Beauty.
These TikTok Lives inform the brand’s product strategy. After hosting a live stream towards the end of 2023, and receiving abundant requests for bronzing drops, Amin brought the launch forward in response to high demand. “We originally had that project on a pipeline and he got off that TikTok Live, literally walked down the hallway and went into where the innovation team was sitting and said, ‘Bronzing drops is on the calendar. We’ve got to move it up and accelerate it because our community is demanding it,’” Lam recalls. The drops launched six months later in April 2024 — well ahead of schedule.
2024
This meant that brands had to enable in-app checkout to continue selling via the respective shopping tabs. Most luxury brands don’t use these features now.
This caused brands a lot of anxiety, especially for those heavily reliant on TikTok. Discussions picked up around the importance of diversifying platform presence. Chinese platform Xiaohongshu, or Red Note, was the unexpected winner.
By this point, engagement had already started dropping off — daily active users decreased from 73.5 million in August 2022 to 23 million in early 2024. At this stage, BeReal was no longer a priority strategy brands were exploring, despite the platform having launched a RealBrands feature earlier in the year that supported official brand profiles.
X content
When a post on X went viral saying, “This tomato is so Loewe I can’t explain it,” the brand took the win and ran with it. “Jonathan posted this tomato clutch bag that we had been in the process of designing in response to it. People loved that,” CMO Smith remembers. The design was launched as a clutch bag in April 2025, accompanied by shopping bags with tomatoes printed on them alongside sacks of tomatoes displayed in-store. “It’s a fun way of reacting to our community and social media. It’s pretty unserious, but also I think it’s just fun for a luxury brand to be engaging with their community that way.” The icing on the cake was when people started making their own versions on TikTok, adding chains to literal tomatoes, he says.
TikTok content
If 2023 opened the doors for luxury brands to tap creators, 2024 was the year where brands engaged more deeply — especially on TikTok. Marc Jacobs amped up its social efforts, breaking away from its previous strategy of repurposing content. “Over the course of 2024, the strategy was [that] we really need to lean into the most entertaining, unique, viral creators on the platform and to bring them into our world, and to leverage their audiences,” director of social and editorial content McCord says. In July, a collaboration with Nara Smith was one of the brand’s most notable, she adds. “We got her to create a video where she bakes a Marc Jacobs Tote bag. The fun part of that was that we really leaned into her organic style of content where she makes everything from scratch… The proof was in the numbers with that one.”
2025
The platform disabled its services for a brief period, before coming back online with a thank you note to President Donald Trump. Amid the chaos, though, Red Note emerged as an appealing alternative, gaining traction (ironically) via TikTok videos. TikTok going dark was also a wake-up call for brands to diversify their channel mixes, if they hadn’t already.
Though brands de-emphasised Snap (previously known as Snapchat) in recent years, the tides are likely to turn as Gen Alpha matures. There’s a good portion of 20-year-olds that aren’t on Instagram, publicist Kuan says — instead, they’re on Snap. Snapchat reaches 90 per cent of the 13 to 24-year-old population, and 75 per cent of the 13 to 34-year-old population in 25-plus countries, according to the platform. “There are a lot of people who can’t really relate to the very polished content that Instagram leans towards,” she says. “So that’s why, almost as an evolution of that, you have a return to Snap, which disappears. It’s not precious.”
TikTok content
Luxury has begun to use social media platforms in more native ways to build intimacy with its community — take Pharrell Williams DM’ing talent scout Albert Ayal with a sneak peak of his Louis Vuitton Men’s collection in June, or Dior using its Close Friends story on Instagram to share creative director Jonathan Anderson’s mood board ahead of his menswear debut. “As brands go more local and intimate with how they approach the consumer, I think we’ll see that [reflected in their social media strategies],” says Snap’s Perez. “They’ll use social media to have one-on-one interactions with customers in a way that feels native to how customers usually interact with their friends on that platform on a daily basis.”
What’s next?
Looking ahead, there’s a level of unpredictability brands have grown accustomed to when it comes to social media. With no major disruptors having emerged since TikTok, experts feel another platform shift is on its way. “Whenever you think there’s a dominant social media platform, another one comes along — you had Facebook and then Instagram came along, and then Instagram gradually became less cool because young people didn’t want to be on it anymore, because their aunts and uncles and parents are on it,” Loewe’s Smith says. “The same thing’s going to happen to TikTok, too. It’s just part of that cycle.”
Experts are also anticipating the impact of AI on social media from a platform, creative and marketing perspective. Meta AI has a section that allows for social feed posting, Gargaro notes, while its recent AI video creation tool ups the creative possibilities. “Imagine a brand doing that with outfits from their latest collection in just a couple of seconds. That’s game-changing in terms of awareness and virality,” she says. In terms of marketing, brands will also be able to use AI assistants within social media to recommend products to customers, she adds.
Meanwhile, the rise of wearables will shape how brands and users interact, experts agree. “Brands will find new ways to incorporate POV-type of content into their socials and we’ll see a whole new way of showcasing their collections in compelling, entertaining ways,” predicts Gargaro. Perez agrees. “We believe people want to be more hands-free and interact more seamlessly with the internet,” he says. Snap is set to create its own smart glasses and is creating AR immersive experiences for luxury brands including Louis Vuitton and Dior, which can be experienced when wearing the accessory.
Brands will continue to lean less on creators and cultivate more in-house storytelling franchises and formats as a means of safeguarding content strategies, McCord predicts. “People are realising that brands are borrowing a lot of cultural cachet from creators and from their communities, and they could end up being a bit of a flash-in-the-pan moment,” she says, meaning brands cultivate their own in-house creator talents. “People are starting to see the power in selling back in house, and building out their own franchises and formats that really establish a narrative that’s more ownable.”
Fundamentally, social media has shifted what fashion prioritises — and it will continue to do so. “The old world was, ‘I made some stuff, somebody should tell the world about it’. Then, there are designers like Jonathan [Anderson] and Virgil [Abloh] who were like, ‘I’m about connection first and the collection second,’” says Rogers. “If you’re talking about what’s changed, that’s it: brands used to be about collections, and now they’re about connection.”
