Has social media ruined fashion week?

With Kardashians now sitting on the front row, Sophie Shaw looks at how the faces of fashion week are changing…

As the avid fashion show enthusiast will notice, this season’s Fashion Week has seen a shift in the styles seen on the catwalks; where models used to sport daring cuts and sometimes bizarre pieces, more and more we’re seeing outfits which the average fashion-lover can aspire to. In Paris, Alexander Wang as the new Creative Director of Balenciaga worked in an easy-going “New Yorker” style to the line. On this side of the channel, Burberry showcased their take on the classic denim jacket, which can’t help but seem like a pretty mundane choice – even a step backwards – compared to their previous displays of sheepskin flying jackets.

Gone are the days where the front row was reserved for editors and the fashion elite

It wasn’t just the ready-to-wear styles that made the event more relatable to the everyday girl. A big trend emerging this season was the use of social media. The Topshop Unique show was called the ‘most socially accessible fashion show to date’, and featured a screen called the InstaMosaic, which displayed images taken from the event and uploaded to Instagram, eventually coming together to produce a ‘social catwalk’. With more and more labels choosing to involve social media, along with styles moving from the catwalk to the high-street with less modifications each year, it feels like Fashion Week has opened its doors to the masses.

Gone are the days where the front row was reserved for editors and the fashion elite. Now bloggers and socialites are able to brush knees with the Anna Wintours of the world. Let’s not forget the stir caused by baby North West sat front row, on the lap of her reality-star mother at the Paris shows. The paparazzi frenzy was on the front pages of newspapers and magazines worldwide, bringing publicity to the event and to the fashion industry as a whole. I can only wonder where this is going for Fashion Week. Will the fashion A-list really want to share those coveted front row seats for much longer? I get the feeling that the high-brow pillars of the industry will be looking down on these new figures – who have little background in high fashion – and will perhaps be disdainful of their easy acceptance into the fashion world. After all, sitting front row is the climax of any fashionista’s life.

Photo: Farrukh / Flickr

With more exposure, brought about by models, bloggers and even the labels themselves, we no longer need to read a high-end lifestyle magazine to hear about Fashion Week. Widespread publicity online has allowed the event to be more accessible to the world.

It was inevitable, what with popular TV shows featuring the event. Channel 4’s hit structured-reality show Made in Chelsea devoted an entire episode to Autumn/Winter 13 London Fashion Week, following members of the cast to various shows, and listening to their comments on the pieces featured. The episode came to a close with a party celebrating the end of Fashion Week, highlighting the importance of the event in London, and so communicating the relevance of this exciting week to the viewers. The organisers of the events were clearly very happy for their shows to be publicised by people who have found their fame doing, well, not very much of note.

The prevalence of fashion is unstoppable. In any form it will be publicised, and the introduction of social media into the industry has delivered a whole new platform to do so on a much bigger scale. The big players in the fashion world may worry that the publicity is causing the event to lose its esteem, but this wave of interest is the source of inspiration for the new generation – no matter their footing. Regular-girls-turned-bloggers are now the fashion elite, and their words being able to reach thousands of their followers in seconds. With trends for Spring more subdued than past seasons, the looks more universal, the whole event less daunting, and even a high-street store like Topshop having their own show in LFW, the demographic seems to have completely changed, hailing a new era for high-street girls among the hustle and bustle of the prestigious Fashion Week.