Mes cheris
New York Fashion Week is right around the corner, and the fashion industry hits crunch mode this week. Long hours at the office or atelier, many Starbucks runs, all culminating to a beautiful Fall/Winter 2012 ensemble that kicks off the fashion week season for the world. Each invitation for a runway show is a labor of love, and much more goes into it than you might think,
the journey of a fashion invitation is long and at times arduous, and here is it's story.
1. Save the Date
A Save the Date email blast is sent out to everyone for your show, hoping they will make space in their calendar to attend. This includes national, regional, and international press, fashion directors and executives of retailers, high volume bloggers, personal guests, family, and clients of the designer, and celebrities.
2. Requests
Then they reach out to you. Everyone from Anna Wintour to smalltime Joe Blogger sends their requests in to whichever shows they would like to attend that fashion week. Since shows at New York Fashion week often overlap in time and vary in locations, you have to request your ideal fashion shows to attend.
3. Process
Most brands utilise a Fashion PR Agency to handle the seating and press for their show. These PR professionals know everyone who needs to be in attendance in the fashion industry and does their best to seat them, and any celebrities as best as possible. So every request is sorted
Yes, No, Maybe, and then replied back to the requester.
*NOTE: this is harder than it sounds. You must process about 4,000 emails in roughly 3 weeks.*
4. Seat
The seating chart arrives from the printer, a large laminated blueprint of the floor plan for the show, ready to be filled with stickers of guests. These stickers get moved several times while you decide who gets front row, who gets booted for a more important member of the press, and who gets at standing ticket.
5. Standing
Every fashion show at Lincoln Center has Standing Tickets. These tickets are a First Come, First Serve basis for the best spots. You stand in a large crowd at the back of the risers behind all the seats. And if you're lucky, an invited guest doesn't show up and you have to fill their seat!
6. Invitations
Throughout this process a design team has decided on the look of that year's fashion show invitation. The invitations arrive from the printers and you begin stuffing them in envelopes, stamping them, and sending them out to all of the fashion industry you would like to fill a seat.
7. E-vite
The standing tickets get sent a matching e-vite for the fashion show which will have their barcode to check in at the front door.
8. RSVP
Some of the invitees will log in to Fashion GPS right away and RSVP for every show they wish to attend. Some will respond and someone from the PR team will manually log in and RSVP for them. This keeps the fashion show list up to date, and allows the team to seat the event properly.
FASHION GPS
All of these steps are managed through
Fashion GPS, the web based management system for the fashion industry. "Fashion GPS enables companies to create a virtual mailing list this is used to send and track invitations, RSVPs, media requests and attendance at fashion events, while simultaneously enabling the virtual management of seating charts and rapid check-in at events." This digital warrior organized and changed to entire fashion industry and is used on a daily basis by everyone.
Who knew that one little envelope had such much work behind it?
Be sure to check out the Fashion 101: History of New York Fashion Week post and get pumped because the countdown to New York Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2012 has begun!
