While most contemporary fashion brand founders and CEOs claim all they want is to “be wherever their customer is,” no one has put their money where their mouth is quite like Tory Burch. For women tired of having to go to a particular Web site at a particular time to livestream Fashion Week’s runways, Burch is instituting an ingenious solution.
The designer is working with Google Lightbox, an ad formatting tool ideal for delivering live content, to stream her Fall/Winter 2014 show across the Web when it takes place later today. Ads depicting live footage from Burch’s runway will stream across sites like Into the Gloss, Garance Doré, Style.com, and glamour.com. Streaming the show through advertising is an amazing thing, in its way — for an event with so many people clamoring to get inside, what does it mean for it to pop up in the kind of sidebar ads most people routinely ignore?
At a time when many people both in and outside of the fashion industry are questioning Fashion Week’s utility, Burch’s undiscriminating, egalitarian livestreaming could be viewed as a technologically relevant breakthrough, or as proof of the whole spectacle’s dwindling worth. What do you think? Do you welcome this broad new approach to sharing the runway, or should fashion stay inside the tents?
