The ever-changing fashion media landscape has never been this fast-paced as it is in 2021 and times when reaching for a fashion magazine to get your latest fashion fix are gone. Content today is often consumed on many different platforms and it could be hard to pin out who the actual producer of the content is. In the last weeks, two major players within the fashion industry have pushed the boundaries of what fashion content actually could be and look like.
Bottega Veneta replaces social media with digital journal
It was with great attention that the Italian luxury house Bottega Veneta cut its ties with social media at the beginning of this year. Speculations have been going on since, whether it was a PR stunt or if the brand has pulled out for good. Worth noticing here is that since the British Creative Director Daniel Lee took the helm of the brand in 2018 its breakthrough on social media has been tremendous and the brand has been in the moment with its sleek and minimal aesthetic. An aesthetic that has appealed to fashion influencers and made them promote the brand within their channels. It has also generated fan accounts such as @newbottega, with a bit over 500k followers, which is publishing both user-generated content together with content made by the brand such as adverts. So, deleting their own account did not make the brand disappear completely.
But now Bottega Veneta has made its own comeback into the digital world and it is with a digital journal, called Issue. The digital journal comes with photography, music, and video and is opening up to the universe and vision of the brand. The first edition of the quarterly journal goes back to the brand’s latest fashion show Salon 01, which in the journal is commented by Neneh Cherry. A newly commissioned music video for Missy Elliot’s 1999 track ”Hot Boyz” is also featured, which has been shot by Derek Blanks, as well as fashion editorials including clothing from both new and earlier collections, among other things.
“Social media represents the homogenization of culture. Everyone sees the same stream of content. A huge amount of thought goes into what I do, and social media oversimplifies it” said Daniel Lee in a comment to The Guardian in advance of the launch.
Gucci teams up with Katie Grand’s newly launched platform
Another Italian luxury brand not afraid of trying new things is Gucci. When presenting their new collection in November 2020, they did it with a film festival called GucciFest, and when launching their collaboration with The North Face they did it by releasing the clothes in the PokémonGo-app as well.
Most recently the Italian fashion house paired up with the new content platform Perfect, founded by the famous publisher and stylist Katie Grand. In its first edition, called Issue Zero the platform has, in collaboration with Gucci, produced the series ’Notes from the Underground’, highlighting independent musicians who have been unable neither to perform or record during the pandemic. The series features musicians from all over the world who have shot their performances in the spring/summer 2021 Gucci collection. It comes along the 456-pages printed issue as a record, with artwork from Alessandro Michele, and is also available to watch on Perfect’s YouTube channel.
