Rogue Is The New Black

A lot of upcoming designers and labels do their own PR (they we know a lot who are investing more than they can afford into a PR agency), so we’re suggesting you had over to Fashion Incubator today as Kathleen explains how to pitch your story to her.

Sure you’re not going to pitch solely to her, but a good portion of what she has to say can be applied to a number of bloggers. Case in point, learning what a blog is about. We get a hundred-and-one submissions about things completely unrelated to our Lifestyle blog, and it’s always obvious when the person knows nothing about who we are and what we do.

860,000 people attended Girorgio Armani’s Privé show in Paris last month. Of course, you can’t fit that many people around a catwalk, and the 860,000 people where there courtesy of show being streamed across the Internet.

Which raises the question - what is your internet presence like?

Larger fashion companies are notoriously bad at getting there act together when it comes to the digital revolution. But your smaller label doesn’t have the same issues. Certainly yo have a much more limited budget, but you don’t have the red tape, layers of management, and the lack of understanding to really get out there.

If brands like Armani are taking up such opportunities, then they’re already out of date and the next big thing is waiting for you to come on board.

Don’t want to spend US$2.5 million on your next fashion show? How about getting some free publicity by way of a hoax?

That’s exactly what Trovata did at New York Fashion Week. Forget paying for a show, send actors to turn up at every show and get people talking about them. Of course, make sure they’re wearing your threads at every photo opportunity.

It cost Trovata money, but no-where-near the millions fashion week cost others. And they got more publicity out of it.

We’re currently in the process of redeveloping Rogue Connect for 2007. There’ll be quite a few tweaks and adjustments to the fashion and lifestyle socialising site, most of which will be aimed at making the site easier to use. We might be taking a leaf out of the book of 37 Signals, but we’re aiming to make the site more simple.

One area that we’re paying particular attention to is the fashion blog. Look for a major reworking of it when the new site goes up, and it’s renaming as the Fashion Diary.

Honestly, it’s just clever spin. Completely PR. But it’s a valid question, are you ready for the ongoing boom in menswear? Do you have a men’s line? Does it have its own name? It’s own style? It’s own marketing campaign?

I bring it up, because soon Tom Ford will.

How will your 2007 line differ from your 2006 line?

Seth Godin points out the obvious, that you must ‘clean house’. That is, you must get rid of the old to bring in the new.

It’s an obvious point, especially in the fashion industry. Fashion changes and we must keep up. But because it’s obvious, it’s so frequently overlooked. You might be updating your offerings, but have you updated your advertising?

Is the story you’re selling through your marketing fresh in 2007?

What do any of us want from advertising? Not as designers or brand managers, but as consumers. Tough question?
What we want from advertising is to feel like fashion can do something for us. Lilly Allen sums it up, “if I buy those jeans I can look like Kate Moss“.

So why this then?

Yes, we want to look hot.

But we also want to feel like wearing fashion (sunglasses, bikini?) can make us look hot. We don’t believe that wearing the featured fashion will make us look like we’ve been under the knife. We don’t even find the thought of that appealing.