Mercedes’ London Fashion Week #StylePitStop Series

This year’s London Fashion Week sees a major increase in profile, big name shows, media interest, as well as bigger investment from sponsors and partners as brands look to leverage the event’s increased international profile.

Principal sponsor Vodafone activating across advertising, digital, in-store and on-pack this year, as well as offering its customers exclusive access to every show at Somerset House in the form of a ‘VIP experience’ and its own exclusive London Fashion Week Lounge branded space.

Other sponsors such as Mercedes-Benz, eBay Fashion, Canon and American Express are all using LFW as a platform to use fashion content as a focus for credibly message across multiple platforms.

This year even sees London Fashion Week launch its first branded product line across 5,000 salons in 40 countries in partnership with Toni & Guy as it aims to further boost global event awareness.

Media sponsor The Evening Standard has adopting a year-round approach through its editorial section ‘Shop London’ – which launches during London Fashion Week. The paper aims to continue to develop the section after LFW which will include a partnership with new local TV channel London Live that will have a transactional strand via a second screen device.

New digital channels are partly behind LFW’s evolution as they open up for more opportunities for consumers to experience the annual platform.

LFW is fast becoming a platform for genuinely innovative marketing and this month’s event is certainly adding to an increasingly rich heritage of original campaigns.

Pinterest has launched its own London Fashion Week hub to provide fashion fans with an image-led, visual and shareable backstage cyber pass. Industry players – from top fashion houses and style publications, to industry bodies, key influencers, designers and models – are posting their ‘insider snaps’ on the site.

Pinterest has brands like ranging from Burberry (who will pin pics straight from the runway), Topshop, Liberty and Selfridges, plus The British Fashion Council, all posting personalised shots, behind-the-scenes pics and image-based styling tips.

The fashion space is clearly a good fit for the social platform, as both the industry and the channel are driven by rich image content and work on strategies based largely around projecting visual statement and celebration.

Topshop is another brand innovating at LFW via a partnership with mobile app Chirp that enables users to rapidly share information in the same vicinity/space via a ‘chirp’ sound.

The retailer itself will use Chirp to share details of LFW with its own customers at both its catwalk show venue (at Regents Park) and at a Chirp garden within its main Oxford Street shop.

The objective is to offer consumers access to elements of and angles on fashion week that otherwise they would never be able to access. Thus images of hair and make-up tests, final backstage preparation photos and Vine videos of models walking down runways

This follows last year’s LFW Facebook app, a ‘Shoot The Show’ style camera app that allowed fans to capture and share moments of the Topshop catwalk show live stream as if they were seated in the very front row.

That app also included an e-commerce function enabling all catwalk products to be purchased directly via the live stream and Topshop online.

That campaign also includes a ‘Tweet Off’ competition, which was also screened on www.Topshop.com, based around tweeting consumer collection reviews in order to enter a Topshop catwalk show ticket competition.

On a more traditional trajectory, The British Fashion Council’s partnership with the New West End Company (NWEC) is launching a reported £25m ‘I Love NY’-style campaign to re-energise Oxford Street that sees the new ‘Ox St’ logo writ large across no less than 75 12-foot flags along London’s keystone shopping street .

Each flag features images of the latest styles from British fashion industry designers and the objective is to ensure that they are seen by the 12 million Oxford Street shoppers passing along the road during the campaign’s 17-day run.

This campaign, which runs during London Fashion Week, will also include retailer events, in-store talks, styling sessions, and DJ sets, as well as its own catwalk shows.