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This Spring/Summer 2025 season, Tory Burch invited social media stars and internet creators, including Maria Georgas, Mandy Lee and Liana Satenstein, to conduct red carpet-like interviews backstage and in the audience at the brand’s show with notable models and guests like Alexa Chung, Jenna Lyons and Love Island USA’s Serena Page. For Tory Burch, the videos generated approximately 13.7 million views for the brand’s TikTok.
Across the shows at New York Fashion Week, an increasing number of creators popped up to carry out video interviews for their audiences as well as put niche spins on runway content. Carolina Herrera partnered with Luke Meagher of @HauteLeMode to introduce and review the collection on TikTok. Moda Operandi tapped TikTok personality Benton McClintock to interview LaQuan Smith, Jonathan Simkhai and Brandon Maxwell backstage. Saks Fifth Avenue worked with freshly viral creator Marty Miller, known for his videos imitating Chat-GPT’s robotic speech, to cover Area’s 10th-anniversary collection in the same tone of voice.
Influencers are, by now, a familiar fixture in the front row at New York Fashion Week. Brand and designer strategies typically follow a formula: tap an influencer — or a crew of them — with big audiences and viral clout to come to the show, snap pics of them in attendance, and hope they talk about your brand and experience at the same time. But this season, brands are taking a more hands-on approach in order to ensure their content at fashion month stands out, as lifestyle and fashion influencers reach peak saturation. They’re reevaluating who they invite to shows, says Lindsey Solomon, founder of lifestyle communications firm Lindsey Media, and are looking for unique content formats and specialities that speak to a community of fans, not just a broad audience. It’s a subtle shift from pure influencers to creators, who share interviews, knowledge and other types of in-depth content with their followers.
“[We] need to see actual pictures of the collection, TikToks and actual video content of what we’re doing,” says Solomon. He adds that what brands want now are creators who promote the shows, not just their appearances at their shows — lest it seem like they’re at just another glamorous event. Solomon encourages lifestyle influencers to take note and evaluate how to expand their types of content and therefore their relationships with brands. “Recently, [an influencer] wrote to me and asked, ‘What can I do better?’ Or, ‘What actually works for your designer?’”
For trend and cultural researcher Agus Panzoni, whether it be Hugo Boss inviting ‘Tube Girl’ to fashion week or Marc Jacobs tapping Nara Smith to ‘cook’ a tote bag from scratch, the most successful brand-creator partnerships are ones that share their platforms to highlight the creator’s specific type of content without inauthentically hijacking a viral trend. For Lee, who has secured paid fashion week content collaborations with luxury brands including Tory Burch, Valentino and Bottega Veneta, reviewing collections and taking her audiences backstage for ‘first looks’, projects like her now-multi-season collaboration with Tory Burch bring the creator into the fold in a role more similar to a freelance brand consultant who can leverage their audiences in a different way from traditional ‘GRWMs’.
It marks a shift in what brands look for in creators — and who they might include in their stable of partners.
While sales are the ultimate goal of any paid partnership, experts in the influencer marketing space believe that the longevity and media impact of a thoughtful collaboration can hold equal value for brands looking to tap popular creators during fashion week and beyond. Anders Bill, co-founder of affiliate link platform Superfiliate, explains that measuring last-click revenue can be too conservative of a metric for valuing an influencer partnership in an imperfect market.
Sandrine Charles, founder of Sandrine Charles PR, partially attributes the success of this new wave of creators to a subtle nostalgia for real-world community, referencing the power of Supreme’s peak hype when It-kids were photographed in the store. “It was so genuine. Brands are just looking to reinvent that nostalgic — but also authentic — way of connecting with their consumers or potential consumers by aligning with people who already have an affinity for their brand.”
Charles adds that many of these new creators, like the now-ultra-viral Jools Lebron, who coined the ‘very demure, very mindful’ trend, exist beyond the traditional fashion sphere. “If there’s a selling power there, then why not? Why not give someone an opportunity to be a turnkey in how they showcase their skills in different categories?” Mike Barcroft, innovation director of London-based advertising agency Cream, emphasises that brands must lean into this new mainstream. “Established media channels face a new challenge of standing out and creating engagement in a new arena,” and nowhere is that more upfront, or saturated, than at fashion week.
“I’m seeing a shift in the content that gets popular. Not necessarily that the same influencers are making new content, but the content that is being pushed by algorithms is changing more towards entertainment than lifestyle,” explains Panzoni. For brands, this shift is coinciding with the latest guard of social media-driven fashion coverage. Lyas Medini, influencer-turned-correspondent for Interview Magazine, whose videos range from collection reviews to A-list front-row interviews, including Lena Dunham at JW Anderson’s LFW show this past week, also partnered with Mowalola to bring one lucky fan with the funniest caption submission on Instagram to the SS25 show and backstage.
Digital marketing expert Kendall Dickieson notes that brands must look internally at how to engage effectively with a creator and their audience. “Half of the battle if your team’s not structured correctly is to even prove the fact that if this person is consistently going viral it makes sense for your brand to invest in them.” As a result, a successful partnership with a creator may require further flexibility on the brand’s side to open up their shows for review and share their platform with the creator’s range of content, like Carolina Herrera’s partnership with Meagher, who specialises in fashion criticism and playful roasts.
This is not to say that brands cannot still rely on the power of influencers to drive sales. In a recent paid partnership with a womenswear brand, Superfiliate’s Bill says that one influencer collaboration saw a 20x return on investment for product sales on a $20,000 paid Instagram post. Marc Jacobs’s single collaboration with TikToker Smith saw a 92 per cent surge in demand for the tote bag in July, according to Lyst. Many proponents in the space have highlighted Marc Jacobs’s and Loewe’s TikTok accounts as leading examples of authentic, influencer engagement because of how creator-led the collaborations are, despite tapping into mainstream viral trends.
“Nara Smith’s rising TikTok influence, combined with Marc Jacobs’s genius marketing, undoubtedly fuelled this trend. Loewe and Dior have also tapped into this new wave of creators, by collaborating with Aki and Koichi, the stylish elderly couple who rose to fame with their OOTD videos,” says Arri Grewal, communications executive at Lyst. Ultimately, according to Bill, in 2024, “the biggest risk is that their organic social and brand becomes irrelevant over time [if] they’re [brands] not willing to kind of relinquish control and they become the dinosaurs in the room.”
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