This Season’s Race Is Over for NYFW Social Media Engagement and the Winner Is…
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There is never any shortage of attention-seekers at New York Fashion Week, but in terms of designers attracting the most social media engagement, Michael Kors took the top prize.
With more than 4 million click-based actions — likes, reactions, shares and comments — Kors significantly led the field. Coach ranked second with 805,263, followed by Tory Buch with 678,716, Thom Browne with 582,952 and Dion Lee with 409,425.
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Part of the reason Kors was able to generate so much attention was his celebrity-studded front row. K-pop star Dayhun, Kate Hudson, Katie Holmes, Lily Aldridge, KiKi Layne, Gloria Steinem, Lea Michele, Ella Hunt, Maddie and Rachel Ziegler, Lisa Rinna, Ellen Pompeo, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Alan Cumming were among those attending.
A collaborative post with the South Korean rapper and musician Dayhun earned top billing with more than 1 million engagements, outperforming any others from brands. That same image of her wearing a cutout black dress generated nearly 67,000 engagements on Twitter, the highest of any NYFW show-related content on the platform this season. A video post narrated by Kors, which highlights the fall collection’s inspiration — women’s empowerment and how style icons Steinem, Tina Turner, Yoko Ono, and Jane Fonda influenced him growing up — was the second strongest post for the company. Other top-performing content covered runway shows, high-profile guests and front-row influencers, who were among the more than 300 people in the audience.
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While designers and brands maximize social media throughout NYFW, they also understand that whom they invite to their runway shows can immensely help how many others catch a glimpse of what they show on their runways. Each brand’s engagement score was based on the click-based actions in direct response to a brand’s social accounts or by way of organic conversation, including new fans and engagements across social media and conversation volume on Twitter and Reddit, according to ListenFirst, the company behind the study.
Instagram was primarily the medium of choice for the New York-based brands during NYFW, especially for video content. However, Xiaoman Chen, client strategist for fashion and luxury at ListenFirst, noted that non-video posts generated 88 percent more average engagements than videos across platforms, “which indicated that non-video posts are still highly effective for show-related content.”
The second-placed Coach seemed to have gotten the message that animal-friendly content or anything food-related generates traffic on social media. (On average, people post twice a week about their pets.) The brand’s animal-shaped and fruit-shaped handbags attracted significant engagement on Instagram. A post of a Coach banana-shaped handbag had 24,758 engagements and a fish-shaped bag was also a strong performer. Coach’s top post though was a video of rapper Ice Spice talking up her house party essentials. (The musician was a familiar face in the front-of-the-house during NYFW, turning up at several shows and parties.) Ice Spice outdid herself for Coach by posting a chat with Lil Nas X at the show, which wound up being Coach’s second most engaging post.
Tory Burch — who launched e-commerce in 2004 — held her own this season in terms of social media engagement with a guest list of 400-plus people. The best-performing Tory Burch post was a collaborative one with “Dance Moms” Maddie Ziegler in which she highlighted her Tory Burch attire and posted video of the runway show from her viewpoint. The designer label’s second top-performing post was a short-form ASMR backstage video of Emily Ratajkowski, whose Instagram following is 29.7 million-strong. The brand’s social media engagement also was boosted by runway-related content, the Tory Burch’s Rewear challenge for Vogue, Anna Wintour sharing her favorite thing about Burch via TikTok, and South Korean actress Park Eun Bin signing on as a new brand ambassador.
As unexpected as a crashed biplane was as a runway prop at the Thom Browne show at The Shed — never mind the imaginative and dramatic collection that was inspired by “The Little Prince” — it was one of the designer’s notable guests who sparked social media. A video of K-pop star Johnny Suh of the South Korean group NCT 127 arriving at the venue was the most engaging post for the company.
The second-half rankings from sixth to tenth were comprised of Area with 283,667, Carolina Herrera at 281,523, A-Company with 205,372, Proenza Schouler with 74,807 and LaQuan Smith with 59,757.
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