The Future of Fashion Publishing is Content
The FSW team announces newly expanded format for fashion and luxury strategy content, analysis, and insights.
This week the European Commission announced their “new strategy” for the future of the internet. They opted to bypass Web 3.0 and move straight to “ Web 4.0 and virtual worlds” in order to “steer the next technological transition and [to] ensure an open, secure, trustworthy, fair and inclusive digital environment for EU citizens, businesses and public administrations.”
The pace at which technology evolves never abates; and it is exceedingly difficult for journalists, researchers, and practitioners themselves to keep up, never mind the general public. We supposedly sailed past NFTs and the metaverse to AI and the semantic web.
Only the popular imagination of the fashion community at large is somewhere else. Where are they? For the moment, it’s all Barbie ahead of the premiere of the “Barbie” movie.
Fashion is famously a mercurial lot, though a loyal one, even if their loyalties can shift like the wind. The 24/7 pace of social media content means that fashion consumer shopping trends come and go before most brands even have a chance to react, which is why the instant production model of fast fashion is so ahead of the game when it comes to consumer needs and preferences.
In spite of what the general media says, the metaverse is not dead. It is evolving as all technologies evolve, along the natural trajectory of Gartner’s well-hyped Hype Cycle. Fashion and luxury tech creatives never stopped building. Digital fashion designers and the companies that build and support XR, AR, VR, metaverse, gaming, NFT, and blockchain technologies have not stopped imagining, creating, and innovating. We’re just not currently hearing about them as much as we did six months ago.
Similarly, fashion and luxury brands continue to do what they do best: making beautiful clothes and figuring out how to sell them to their target consumers. The worlds of fashion design and the core business of fashion are and are not changing along with technology. Best practices remain in place to guide collection design and, in turn, branding, advertising, and marketing, though the tools and channels available to brands, agencies, and creators continuously grow. One day it is AI-driven campaigns; the next it os the birth of Meta’s Threads to take on Twitter.
Wading through this sea of news and noise, our team at Fashion Strategy Weekly (FSW) decided it was time for a new look and a new approach as we hit our one year anniversary. As strategists, we feel strongly that it is increasingly hard for fashion and luxury brands to find practical, actionable insights to guide business decision making on a short- and long-term basis. Reporting the news is simply not enough and provides few guideposts or how-tos to support business decision makers and help them siphon through the noise to find out what they really need to know to make smart, informed choices that support their brand’s vision and goals and achieve desired outcomes.
The new format of FSW is purposefully uncomplicated. We offer a fresh B2B perspective on fashion and luxury by providing easy-to-digest, expert-led analysis, news, and opinions. We cover a range of topics that may grow over time but for now are limited to:
Fashion: This section includes collection and campaign reviews, designer and creative interviews, brand profiles, and historical analyses.
Strategy: This section provides deep insights and expert-led analyses and position pieces across branding, marketing, and social media with the occasional emphasis on content strategy, since it is a core principle of the firm behind FSW.
Economics: This section focuses on the retail economics of the fashion and luxury industries with analyses of the key supply and demand side drivers for products and services, revenue analysis, and developments such a major M&A analyses.
Tech: This section explores the creatives, creators, and creations that drive fashion innovation, including: digital fashion; AI; XR, AR, VR, and metaverse; and tech solutions for e-commerce, product development, marketing, and more.
Sustainability: This section relates to sustainability and climate change with a focus on efforts against greenwashing and in support of putting standards in place to drive brand transparency and oversight.
On the whole, the goal of the new FSW and its deepened focus across the gamut of fashion and luxury is to start a real conversation on what really matters and to encourage brands, designers, and consumers to be better and to do better in an industry with so much beauty and so much potential to do good things.