Not so long ago, designers only had to worry about celebrities stealing attention from their clothes. Despite the fact they’re only invited and seated in the front row to create buzz, fashion insiders moan about movie actors, reality TV stars, and rappers sucking all the media oxygen. Others speak out about the secret practice of paying celebrities to attend collections. “What do they show you in the papers after a fashion show?” asked designer Nicole Farhi. “Not the clothes, but the celebrities who are being paid to sit at the show.”
While paying celebrities is shady, inviting Kim Kardishan to glare at the runway through big dark sunglasses is relatively harmless. Like designers giving gowns to actresses to wear on the red carpet, it’s another means to get the label press in a competitive media environment. My all-time favourite celebrity fashion show moment is from Unzipped, the 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi that captures the moment when Hollywood actors began taking the industry back from super models. Richard Gere, Sandra Bernhard, and Liza Minnelli are all present at Mizrahi’s show. Roseanne Barr cackles and snaps pictures, having the time of her life.
Celebrities continue to be a front row mainstay. In attendance at Rebecca Minkoff’s Fall 2013 show in New York last week were actors Jaime King and Shenae Grimes, and singers Ashlee Simpson and Kate Nash. The collection, described by Liza Darwin as a “tomboyish twist on the basics,” featured colour-blocked sweaters, large-collared leather jackets, and the designer’s very first pieces of evening wear. Minkoff is on the upswing, with a flagship store in New York set to open this summer, and two other outlets in China and Japan. By putting five pieces from the collection for sale on her website as the show took place, Minkoff demonstrated her Internet-savvy.
The other attempt at online synergy was, shall we say, less successful. As attendees were taking their seats (and, presumably, snapping surreptitious pictures of Ashlee Simpson), a giant screen above the runway showed a livestream of tweets using the hash tag #RMFall. The idea was that people watching the show, both there and at home, would tweet their reactions. Since the models had not come out yet, I don’t really know what reactions people were supposed to be tweeting, besides “I just saw Ashlee Simpson!”
Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos tweeted about the hash tag and the screen, spreading the story to shadowy group of online pranksters who go by Weird Twitter. As described by Nick Douglas, Weird Twitter is “a loose group of Twitter users who write in a less-accessible form, using sloppy punctuation/spelling/capitalization, poetic experimentation with sentence format, first-person throwaway characters, and other techniques little known to the vast majority of ‘serious’ Twitter users.” (Didn’t realize I was a “serious” Twitter user until today.) Douglas admits that they are sometimes hard to distinguish from unintentionally bad users, like teenagers who use ‘textspeak’ and automated Twitter-bots.
Weird Tweeters jumped at the chance to publicly embarrass a room full of fancy fashion people with joke tweets. Unfortunately, not many of the tweets were actual jokes.
“I love to eat turds,” posted ‘@Cheesegod69′.
“9/11 Was Actually F—ing Cool As Hell And I Hope it Happens Again,” contributed ‘@Dogboner’.
‘@Kept_simple’ went to a poetic and sad place with the tweet, “At some point we all must face death alone.”
The funnier tweets had something to do with fashion, pillaring an industry viewed as stiff and humourless.
“I AM TRAPPED IN AN IMPOSSIBLY HUGE PAIR OF JEANS BACKSTAGE AT RMFALL EVENT PLEASE ASSIST ME IN GETTING OUT OF THE JEANS”
‘@SatelliteHigh’ posted a picture of dorky Velcro sandals with the caption, “Checking out all the hot new footwear styles at fashion week!”
Pornographic images and a picture of a pig with bowel problems also made it unto the screen before the organizers took them down.
The most charitable thing you can say about Weird Twitter is that’s it’s a form of comedy that grew organically from this new medium. Not to get all Marshall McLuhan about it, but it would be missing the point to evaluate it based on traditional comedy’s guidelines. The best Weird Twitter has a manic, absurdist bravado, like shock comedy by way of Dadaism.
But I’m mostly reminded of the kids in class who made fart noises behind the teacher’s back. If their scatological outbursts were meant to offend the fashion show crowd, the prank didn’t really work. Notopoulos claims the attendees barely glanced at the screen.
From online shopping to the embrace of teenage fashion bloggers and the proliferation of designers’ personal Twitter and Instagram accounts, the fashion industry is still figuring out how to best use the Internet. The benefits of social media lay in its inherent interactivity. Once, we were asked to read reviews of fashion shows. Then, to watch Jeanine Becker attend them on TV. Now we can respond to them as they unfold in real time, and post our thoughts for the whole world to see. With baby steps, the fashion industry is opening up, but it’s unclear if either side is ready. Involving Twitter is like opening Pandora’s box–be prepared to cover your ears.
Sure enough, even though most fashion sites reviewed Minkoff’s clothes and ignored the hijacking of #RMFall, the Weird Twitter stunt was the thrust of Notopoulos’s coverage on Buzzfeed, and why I’m writing about the show now. Perhaps, in a round about way, the livestream of tweets did its job, helping to make Minkoff and her label more famous. A cynic might even suggest a designer Twitter-bomb herself to make her collection go viral. Perhaps I’m an old fogey, but I prefer my fashion without a side of pig diarrhea.
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Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
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