Fashion’s Air Kiss to Technology—WOW!!

Fashion's Air Kiss to Technology

Lately, the fashion and technology industries were like high school elites on opposite sides of the cafeteria. But fashion-tech melt from Gilt Group to Pinterest—have made mingling obligatory.

If anyone has firsthand experience of the fashion and tech world crossover—once a reluctant toe-dip, now arguably a fait accompli—it’s Yuli Ziv.

A branding veteran from the marketing world, Ziv wrote the book (Blogging Your Way to the Front Row) on how to run a profession out of writing about fashion trends and is founder and chief executive officer of Style Coalition, a 4-year-old network of 40 fashion and beauty blogs with 3.5 million monthly visitors.

Tomorrow , on the night of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York, Ziv is presenting the Fashion 2.0 Social Media Awards, which combines fashion luminaries who are on the forefront of technology.

Away of that New York City fete, which will bring TV fashion host Robert Verdi and a keynote by designer Norma Kamali, Ziv talked with Portfolio.com about three symbols of fashion and technology’s double-air-kiss well known to public.

1. Fashion Bloggers on the Agenda

You know those scribes/photographers/video producers who put together fashion online blogs? Call them the affectionate behind scene heroes, not bloggers, and their audiences are more approached than any other time.

“They started with a blog, but today they are affectionate,” says Ziv. “They have a Twitter following, they have Facebook fans they may have a YouTube channel.”

Besides being multicast-channel, each Style Coalition blog has a various niche–from college fashion trends, which allows millions of users, to corporate, which shows wardrobe and beauty advice to girls and women in the corporate world, such as lawyers.

Ziv’s network of blogs is profitable through advertising that allows clients subject those specific niche bloggers, and by a revenue partnership with Elle magazine,\ and Hearst Digital Media, for which it provides branded content and video events in coordination with brands ranging from Lancome and Microsoft to J.C. Penney. They don’t share editorial content with Hearst, but that’s something that Ziv says she is pursuing.

2. Minimalist Technology, Maximum Style

Fashion brands used to be uneasy travelers in the tech world to reach the recent fashion trends—and some found it unseemly to even sell merchandise online. But with mobile devices like smart-phones and the iPad, technology has gone all Calvin Klein minimalist—and that suits fashion just fine.

Mobile apps like digital pin-board Pinterest, photo-sharing app Instagram, and social networks like tumblr beckon the fashion industry with the ability to share images on the fly.

3. Instant Gratification?

When Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week begins on Thursday, designers will be revealing their clothes for the Fall 2012 season showing glamorous fashion trends, even though it’s not yet spring.

The six-month gap between ramp and retail is disappointing for digital types. It was no big deal when print magazines that ran the photos three months after they were the only media game in town. But live and instant blogging and instant images from the broadcast-ed shows has made Fashion Week seem out of sync.