I've recently read somewhere that "The fashion industry is a premier success story of leveraging social media to convert posts into purchases and that Pinterest, bloggers and Facebook have partially taken trendsetting out of the hands of ragmags and put it on-line into a more easily accessible and visually appealing formats."

     Even though, I'm kind of a old school girl and prefer good old fashion shows and magazines to bring me all the newest trends and information, the pace the fashion world is moving kind of makes it inevitable for the designers not to move along and keep up with new formats of social media and digital technology, that makes them more accessible and available to masses.

     Since I'm not as informed as one should be, I browsed a web and came across an article in CNN that explains how social media fundamentally changed the way people shop and discover fashion.    
   
     Consumers have greater access to brands and expect open, authentic dialogue. With the social media everything became more instant. Sites like Style.com beam images directly from the runway, so do fashion bloggers who take pictures from the front row and instantly share the images on social media. So the moment the designer or the brands show their goods, through platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest you're getting real time critiques, that can actually help the designer to get an instant feedback before finalizing production decisions.

     The fashion shows use to be for editors and buyers mostly and the consumer was kept in a dark for another six months until the actual product became available. These days designers are reaching out to consumers in any possible way whether it is through their direct web site or selling collections off the runway allowing them to pre-order looks through e-commerce site like ModaOperandi.

     Some of the designers are experimenting with digital fashion shows, which are usually staged ahead of time, don't cost as much as the real thing and are much more accessible not only to editors and buyers but masses as well. KCD, the talent and production agency, which produces most of the live Fashion Week shows launched the product at last season's shows in February. In September, designers as Chloe, ICB, and Pierre Balmain debuted their first digital shows, which are not suppose to replace traditional runway shows, but provide an alternative for brands that might not get the same audience or attention.

   After all my research, I can finally see why are designers embracing these new developments in social media. Not only they enjoy more direct interaction with consumers, but can easily become globally well-known in ways they couldn't possibly imagine a few years ago.