Navigating the Luxury and Fashion Content Platform Maze
FSW analyzes the differences between overarching content platform strategy and specific platform content marketing strategies and why brands need both.
Insights
Content platform strategy must be rooted in a brand’s overarching content strategy, not just short-term marketing goals. Successful luxury and fashion brands treat platform selection as part of a larger storytelling framework, aligning each channel (digital or print, IRL or social) with brand values, voice, and audience behavior to ensure coherence, consistency, and long-term relevance.
Modern fashion and luxury brands are leveraging a diverse, purpose-driven mix of content platforms—TikTok, Substack, podcasts, video, and print—to express identity, deepen audience connection, and stand out in a saturated digital environment. From Bella Freud’s quirky YouTube show to Chanel’s polished podcast, or Miu Miu’s auteur-led film series to Rare Beauty’s long-form mental health Substack, successful brands build layered, strategic ecosystems rather than chase trends.
To build a resilient and culturally resonant content strategy, brands must move from reactive content production to proactive content ecosystem design—auditing current performance, aligning platform use with creative vision and target audiences, and fostering partnerships with creators who reflect the brand’s ethos. The goal is not just content creation, but cultivating a branded world that audiences want to enter, return to, and share.
Typically, people reflect on content platform strategy as a marketing problem to meet marketing needs. But, this is actually too narrow a lens for most brand content.
In practice, it is more profitable to reflect on platform choice with reference to a holistic content strategy and ask where does the platform fit in the broader content ecosystem created by a brand. After all, the world of content, including both digital and IRL publishing, offers an almost overwhelming array of options for retail, fashion, and luxury brands to connect with their audiences. From micro-content on TikTok to the enduring allure of print, each platform offers a spectrum of possibilities to shape the way a brand conveys its vision and values.
There is no universal formula for content platform strategy for retail fashion, and luxury brands. The most effective approaches come from understanding how platform features and functionality, content type and format, audience expectations and behaviors, and brand identity align in unique and meaningful ways.
Content Platform Strategy vs Platform Content Marketing Strategy
In fashion and luxury, creating truly effective content is all about getting the right message to the right audience on the right channel at the right time. Understanding the difference between content strategy and content marketing can help brands focus on where to focus their strategy building efforts based on their specific goals and needs.
Brand content effectiveness begins by investing in a robust holistic content strategy, an overarching framework to drive brand storytelling across all digital and IRL touchpoints. Strategically speaking, holistic content strategy operates as the big picture roadmap and connective tissue for your brand content, ensuring every interaction with your audience reflects your brand’s identity, purpose, and core narrative.
Within this overarching content strategy framework, one critical element for consumer-facing brands is content platform strategy. Using this strategy, each platform—from social channels and podcasts to e-mail marketing, newsletters, and print—is chosen not for its trendiness, but for how well it aligns with the brand’s values, voice, and how and where it best connects with the audience.
Content platform strategy involves the design and creation of a purposeful ecosystem of platforms that amplify a brand’s story. This strategic content layering from a brand’s holistic content strategy into its content platform strategy ensures no platform operates in isolation. That said, it is critical for brands to continue to invest in platform content marketing strategies to stay relevant and drive consumer engagement. To be specific, individual platform content marketing strategy focuses on creating and distributing content tailored to specific platforms (e.g., Instagram, LinkedIn, website, etc) and revolves around leveraging the unique features, functionality, audience behaviors, and algorithms of each platform to maximize engagement and reach.
Brands should have multiple platform content marketing strategies that make sense for their unique vision, goals, products, and audiences. But all of these strategies should tie into brands’ overall content platform strategy (which is a subset of their overarching holistic content strategy, if you want to get technical).
Independent Voices on TikTok and Substack
Retail, fashion, and luxury founders and creators are finding new ways to express their creativity and build their brands through specific content platform strategies that match their brand values, often in unexpected ways. For instance, Rebecca Minkoff, founder of her namesake brand, has a highly successful LinkedIn newsletter, “You Can’t Make This Sh*t Up!”, which highlights her own interest in a range of topics from innovation to menopause, sharing insights from her own journey as a CEO in fashion.
The enduring influence of TikTok as a content platform continues to expand across regions and demographics, positioning the platform as an ongoing launchpad for independent fashion voices. Despite TikTok’s precarious future in the US, fashion stylists, trend forecasters, and other creators continue to build their businesses on the platform, offering creative points of view from the outside and inside of fashion through styling tips, collection reviews, product recommendations, and other creative content. After the temporary ban on TikTok earlier this year, many fashion creators are now diversifying their approach to focus on alternative content platform strategies that make sense for their specific vision and goals, whether Threads, Instagram, BlueSky, or other platforms.
Launching an independent newsletter or community platform has become a popular choice among fashion and luxury creators and brands. As we have explored, platforms like Substack empower independent creators and niche brands without algorithmic limitations. Increasingly, Substack is no longer just a place for long-form content and audio-only podcasts. The platform now offers a full suite of content types, features, and functionality, including embedded video, photos, and audio, which people are using in highly idiosyncratic ways. Creators are filling Substack with style shots and inspo pics, using it as a more dynamic, content-rich replacement for Instagram; whereas others are launching video podcasts and live styling tutorials, along with text guidance, in conjunction with YouTube to provide a more immersive, thoughtful content experience.
Brand Podcasts and Video
Of course, in fashion and luxury, podcasts and video content occupy a much larger space outside of the sphere of platforms like Substack and even Tiktok. Dynamic content like video and podcasts presents significant opportunities for fashion and luxury brands seeking to build deeper connections with their audiences. These formats offer intimate, engaging ways to showcase brand identity, share stories, and create emotional resonance. Finding the right approach to dynamic content can help fashion and luxury brands tap into modern consumers’ craving for more human, meaningful, and authentic experiences while expanding their digital presence.
For fashion and luxury brands, podcasts and videos function as immersive storytelling tools that can be used in flexible, brand-specific ways. Podcasts can serve as a space for thought-provoking, in-depth discussions that add depth and context to a brand’s heritage; or they can function as a way to humanize a brand through less serious, more unstructured conversations that bring more immediacy. On the podcast level, think about the difference between Chanel’s more straightforward and narrative ”Chanel Connects” podcast vs Bella Freud’s on-the-couch, slightly tongue-in-cheek “Fashion Neurosis” YouTube series.
On the one hand, the “Chanel Connect” podcast represents unparalleled, highly polished brand storytelling, offering stimulating conversations with artists, designers, and cultural leaders at the intersection of art, fashion, and innovation. This is perfectly appropriate and well attenuated to the brand’s intellectual curious, highly educated luxury audience. On the other hand, Bella Freud’s “Fashion Neurosis” is intimate and quirky, diving deep into Freud’s own opinions and reflections. While ostensibly focused on fashion and luxury, Freud’s podcast is geared towards a slightly more irreverent luxury fashion consumer who values relatability and authenticity over any elevated narratives or brand heritage.
Naturally, dynamic content in fashion and luxury is hardly limited to podcasts. Fashion and luxury brands have been investing in video and film well before the age of social media, always with a highly curated mindset. A strong example of this is Miu Miu through its ”Women’s Tales” film series. For the past 15 years, the brand has been investing in short films directed by acclaimed female filmmakers. Each film functions as both fashion and social commentary, encapsulating Miu Miu’s edgy, culturally relevant brand vision.
Another advantage of dynamic content like videos and podcasts is the sheer platform flexibility. These content types can be digital but also IRL on the runway, in retail media, or even out-of-home advertising. But, like all content platforms, getting dynamic content right is all about having the right content platform strategy behind it. Brands need to know their own goals and creative vision but also the unique features, functionality, and algorithms,specific audiences, and best practices of each platform. In short, fashion and luxury brands need a specific video content platform strategy to ensure that video is up to brand standards and is appropriately attenuated to platform nuances and the cultural moment. This is equally true for short-form video content platforms like TikTok that attract younger, more digitally-inclined consumers as it is for longer-form audio podcasts on Apple Podcasts that attract older audiences.
Reinventing Content Through Print
While digital content gets most of the attention these days, an increasing number of fashion and luxury brands are rediscovering the creative impact and lasting power of old-school print. This is part of an interesting post-pandemic shift within fashion and luxury towards offline experiences in an effort to control or re-route ever-escalating digital content marketing costs, as well as a simple desire to do something more editorial and therefore different.
To fight back against a glut of same-feeling, often fleeting digital content, print offers an easy way for brands to differentiate themselves and connect with audiences. Print offers a longer shelf life and a more tactile way to target niche audiences through high-quality, editorial-style content that reflects a brand’s ethos. As Lei Takanashi notes in a piece for The Business of Fashion, “print can offer [value] just by virtue of being a physical item.” The quiet success of initiatives like Bottega’s print fanzines, Louis Vuitton’s City Guides, Patta’s bi-annual magazine, Ralph Lauren’s “Polo” print newsletter, or, more recently, Miu Miu’s book club, show the increased interest in slower, more tangible forms of content.
However, print–by its nature as slow content–requires significant time, resources, and staff, making it more of a brand-building tool than a direct sales driver. Fashion and luxury brands considering print should evaluate their capacity to create meaningful, lasting content and whether or not such a move aligns with their broader content strategy.
Brands that choose to invest in print need a balanced content platform strategy to make it work alongside other channels. According to one expert in Takanashi’s article, brands should “invest in a mixed marketing budget that dedicates 40 percent to digital, 40 percent to print and 20 percent for influencer partnerships and other brand advertising.”
Even legacy fashion publications are finding new ground in this renewed print momentum. Recently, i-D magazine relaunched with a stronger focus on print, reinforcing the cultural relevance of print in an increasingly digital-first landscape. Similarly, in 2024, Vice, Spin, Complex, and Nylon all announced a return to print, after pulling back in the past few years. As Patta magazine editor-in-chief David Kane told The Business of Fashion, “The beauty of a magazine … is that it acts as a snapshot of a moment in time in a way that social media doesn’t while still fueling a brand’s other channels and telling its story.”
The tactile, enduring nature of print editorial potentially allows fashion and luxury brands a way to set themselves apart in a crowded content ecosystem. Rather than competing with digital, it complements and elevates a multi-channel content platform strategy, offering audiences a richer, more immersive experience. For fashion and luxury, print is not a step backward—it is a deliberate, strategic step into narrative brand universe creation.
The Rise of Long-Form Content
Rare Beauty’s Substack exemplifies the power of on-brand, culturally-relevant content platform strategy. The brand publishes thoughtful posts that emphasize mental health advocacy alongside its product offerings, successfully blending brand philosophy with storytelling. Similarly, Tibi’s “Creative Pragmatist” Substack redefines wardrobe building through authentic text and video posts, combining intentional design with editorial-style guides to help consumers build and style their wardrobe.
As Julian Randall noted in a recent article, “What Makes Tibi So Cool?”, for Essence, “Content platforms thrive when their identity aligns with the identity of the community they serve.” Adopting long-form content as part of a wider content strategy can work for retail, fashion, and luxury brands when the content resonates authentically with the brand’s ethos and when the target audience values depth and reflection.
However, not every brand needs a long-form content platform strategy. A brand like Miu Miu or Coach that caters to younger, trend-driven demographics, for instance, may achieve greater success through the immediacy and energy of TikTok videos rather than editorial essays on platforms their target audiences do not regularly use.
Building a Strategic Content Platform Ecosystem
Now is the time for fashion and luxury brands to shift from reactive content planning to proactive content strategy and strategic content ecosystem building. For many brands, investing in content platform strategy is often an easy place to start their content strategy journey.
Ask yourself: Are you selecting content platforms based on what aligns with your brand voice and long-term story—or based on what everyone else is doing or what you think you should be doing? Are you using each content channel with clarity, intention, and defined, channel-appropriate structure and messaging—or are you fragmenting your message across disconnected formats?
One easy way to assess strengths and weaknesses in your existing content platform strategy is to audit your current content. What’s performing well? Why is it doing well? Where does your brand feel most authentic? Then, take the time to intentionally explore where you can expand or refine. This is where collaborating with an experienced content strategist can add value to assess gaps, opportunities and challenges, and recommend ways to refine and optimize.
Another critical element for fashion and luxury brand content is to build relationships with creators and storytellers who align with your brand ethos. Think beyond your own platform content marketing campaigns and into cultural relevancy. Whether through a platform like TikTok or Substack or limited-edition publishing, the goal of content strategy through tools like content platform strategy is not just to produce content; but rather, it is to build a brand universe your audience wants to enter, revisit, and share.