For a subset of strictly fashion-adjacent New Yorkers, Fashion Week is a biannual excuse to pretend you are busier and more in-demand than usual, which is why late on Saturday night, I was congratulating myself on being en route to the Heaven by Marc Jacobs party, where the promise of watching Doja Cat perform kept the usual nocturnal instincts to be home, or at least to not be encased in non-platform boots, at bay. The plan was to meet up with a friend and drop by early to see what the vibe was like; I envisioned us getting waved swiftly in through the door, ideally buoyed on a breeze of Daisy Eau So Intense. The party began at 10 p.m., my ETA was 10:18 p.m., and all seemed well until my Uber plopped me a block away from Bushwick mecca, or what is more commonly known as Elsewhere, and I realized I’d made a critical error: At least three lines, each sized more appropriately for entry to a daylong music festival than a fashion party, snaked in varying directions around the block. I was already too late.
For almost two hours, I waited helplessly in the line for guests on the general invite list, watching as each new arrival did the same double take I’d just executed before marching over to the door to see if there had been some mistake—only to grudgingly walk past again, adding themselves to the crowd now constricting most of the block. Once my friend arrived, we spent far too long sending photos of the hot dog stands (geniusly) positioned around the entrance in an attempt to find each other; she wound up hanging out next to the door, where apparently everyone was trying to argue and out-clout their way in. “‘I love your TikToks’ is all anybody in this line is saying to each other,” she texted me from her vantage point. I found her just in time to watch Evan Mock amble out from the party with a phone pressed to his ear, attempting to instruct a friend on how to circumnavigate the chaos. In lieu of our own deus ex Mock-ina, we eventually flagged down a preternaturally calm publicist sporting a low ponytail who ushered us in: But once inside the bowels of Elsewhere, we quickly realized, the real crowd awaited. We left after 20 minutes in pursuit of hot dogs.
Waiting and waiting to get into a room that you then realize is too packed (or too young, or too cool, or too uncool) for your tastes is, of course, an expected (often nutritionally ego-trimming) phenomena in nightlife ritual. But something about that party felt uncanny, as if everyone was tuned in to some undercurrent frequency that I couldn’t access. The following morning, GQ writer Samuel Hine’s Fashion Week newsletter, Show Notes, landed in my inbox with something like an explanation: Via Q&A, an anonymous fashion publicist mentioned how TikTok is playing an increasing role in flooding the NYFW zone. “Supposedly, there are people out there posting TikToks about how to get into fashion week shows and parties if you’re not in the industry,” they explain when asked about whether this season really did feel crazier than in years past. “They list PR emails. Those are the scary ones…. It was already bad before—there were always a lot of random requests—but it’s actually gotten so much worse because of TikTok.”
Amazingly, finding the TikToks in question turned out to just be a matter of searching “how to get into NYFW” on the app. And while many videos offered rather generic advice—recommending viewers check the CFDA schedule, for example, or doing their research on the brands they followed—a majority of ones I found encouraged TikTokers on the art of finding then cold-emailing publicists. One particular video from influencer Tiff Baira, who specializes in giving recs on dating and nightlife on TikTok, includes a screenshot of a five-page tip sheet listing PR contacts and email addresses from FW21 (which, as she assured viewers, were likely to remain the same this season). On Baira’s Instagram page, you can download the entire document yourself. As of press time, the video has been viewed more than 347,000 times; in the comments, fellow TikTokers ask Baira’s advice on what to wear and “Who wants to go with me last-minute?”
Curious, I reached out to a handful of fashion publicists to get a read on whether videos like these were making waves for others in the industry; all of the ones I talked to (under the condition of anonymity, of course—de rigueur for that PR life) said they’d either heard about such TikToks or experienced the inbox flooding themselves. One contact mentioned that they’d had trouble figuring out where so many of the random requests were coming from—plus the fact that, somewhat hilariously, they were often getting cc’d along with a bunch of other reps for different brands all in the same email. Another contact estimated that they were receiving at least 30 to 50 emails each day from influencers trying to attend a show; a third put the range closer to 50 to 100.
The go-to move was to ignore these cold calls, but for those in the business of strategizing event invites, seating charts, and guests lists across dozens of brands over a single week, they told me, even a microsecond spent scanning an extra email clogs up the workflow. “It’s basically just adding chaos into the equation,” as a fourth publicist tells me. “Privacy-wise, it can definitely get crazy because people will find your personal email, your social media, and hit you up on every platform possible.”
But as the anonymous publicist in the GQ newsletter noted, the headache is bleeding into live events as well: Invites are also getting leaked, leading to situations where an algorithmically determined amount of people are showing up and hoping for the best. This was the issue with Saturday night’s Marc Jacobs party, apparently, which I was told had indeed been floated around on TikTok, prompting the event team to be on high alert for crashers. “The problem is not so much that we can’t spot who the impostors are,” as one publicist explained to me. “What happens from a production and PR standpoint is that it really delays the shows or parties from happening, because you get a cluster of people at the bottom, and they’re not going to move, and you have to check everyone’s credentials one by one.”
When I reached out to Baira over the phone, the 25-year-old TikToker acknowledged that responses to her video have been mixed. “It’s never my intention to make someone’s work harder, but if that information is meant to be private, it should be private,” Baira told me, adding that the much-discussed tip sheet wasn’t something she’d actually put together herself—she’d found a link to the document online. “My intention is to never share any information that isn’t public, so the fact that that was already on the New York Fashion Week website means that it is public information.”
For Baira, the ability to share this kind of intel—alongside tips for aspiring models to make the most out of casting calls—is part of her general mission to democratize insider information, partially stemming from her own experience working as a Fashion Week intern while attending college in New York and then as a model after graduating. “I don’t believe in gatekeeping,” she says. “I think if we can utilize TikTok as a way to to share information and to tell the next generation of creatives and people trying to get into fashion that, ‘Hey, I learned this and I want to share with you so you don’t have to get unpaid internships for a year’—if I can help you get a little closer to your fashion dream without having to go through what I went through, I’m going to do it.” Besides, it’s not as if—in a world where Deux Moi, Guest of a Guest, and even Gawker Stalker, at one point, have existed—the business of recommending parties is anything new. “It’s not a TikTok problem,” as Baira put it. “Whenever there’s a new platform for communicating different events, not everyone’s going to like it.”
There is a case to be made that the TikTokification of Fashion Week is reminiscent of the days when many a pearl was clutched over the swift coup of power that bloggers brought to the high fashion world in the 2000s; the worth of a press pass handed over to an influencer capable of nabbing millions of views for a single video over a more institutional content creator (gulp) makes itself more obvious with each passing day. Still, the velocity and scale at which even the cultiest blogs (and Instagram influencers too) operated now pale in comparison to the way almost anyone, seemingly, can win TikTok’s jackpot lottery of virality overnight: The size of TikTok’s audience and the mysterious whims of its algorithm imbue any viral video with the overall potential effect of dropping hundreds, if not thousands, of viewers possibly literally at your door. As anyone whose favorite bar, vacation spot, or even hip small business have been “chosen” by the TikTok masses can attest to, the scale of TikTok looks increasingly incompatible with real life’s capacity issues.
“It’s a big learning curve for sure,” one of the fashion publicists, who described themselves as a personal fan of TikTok, acknowledged. “It becomes a man power issue. At regular shows, you would have four or five checking in, and that’s okay, but what happens if 20% of them are not even on the list? You still have to check them one by one…. Runway shows are 15, 20 minutes. It’s a very high-stress situation.” (Another publicist put it this way: “Ultimately it doesn’t hinder my job to a point where I’m incapacitated, so I guess power to the people?”) And while there aren’t any immediate answers for adapting to the random TikTok–driven deluges, this contact mentioned seeing the international events like Shanghai Fashion Week start to experiment with back-to-back shows—one that’s invite only, one that’s ticketed and open to the public, which could serve as a compromise between traditionalists and the TikTok crowd. Plus, there’s always the metaverse.
Whatever the answer is, it looks like the fashion industry will have to figure something out fast: The TikTok inundation is a matter of crowd control, sure, but it’s also raising high-stakes questions about the nature of modern fashion’s supposed commitment to accessibility, inclusivity, and relevance. Ignore the TikTokers, and you risk spurning a rising generation of culturati—and having to confront perhaps an even more existential question, like the one Baira posed bluntly to me over the phone: “Why do you think the industry belongs to you?”
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September 14, 2022 at 01:05AM
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Is TikTok Turning Fashion Week Into Pure Chaos? - Vanity Fair
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