Join us on Wednesday, June 19 at 17:00 BST / 12:00 EDT for our next BoF Professional Masterclass. BoF’s Marc Bain and Liz Flora, along with a panel of experts, will break down the key strategies for brands launching and growing a loyalty programme in beauty and fashion, at all points of the process.

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The fashion industry has no shortage of buzzwords; chief among them is “buzz” itself.

Online chatter is highly prized in fashion, and for good reason: the ability to get people talking can make or break a brand. In recent years, a cycle has emerged. Brands do something meant to start a conversation, whether it’s putting on a runway show that seems to be more about getting attention than presenting clothes; dressing celebrities in their most polarising pieces; or churning out products meant to provoke. Usually, the more outlandish or unexpected the move, the more attention it receives, on social media and in the traditional press. Likes and shares, and metrics like earned media value surge. That is, until people move on and brands are forced to come up with what’s next, each time, trying to top their past.

The whole thing is understandably seductive.

“Buzz implies … the brand isn’t pushing the story down your throat. People are reacting and evangelising on your behalf,” said Tony Wang, founder of luxury consulting firm Office of Applied Strategy. “If you can unlock it, it’s infinitely more scalable than paid media.”

Still, it can be hard to tell whether much of that noise has meaning, or a lasting impact.

From some vantage points, buzz’s connection to generating long term sales and desire looks tenuous. Brands who relied on eye-catching virality throughout the 2010s — most notably, Balenciaga and Gucci — have embraced a more subdued, heritage-driven approach in the midst of sales slumps. Meanwhile, the labels thriving in the middle of a wider luxury downturn, like Hermès, Brunello Cucinelli and Prada, put less focus on attention-grabbing stunts.

Banking on this sort of attention is a risky endeavour in an environment where it’s more and more difficult to make moments that stand out. In turn, many brands are re-evaluating their strategies when it comes to how they build and measure buzz — and what exactly it’s worth.

“Buzz is awareness, amplification and excitement,” said Lucien Pagès, founder of his namesake communications firm. “You need to have it, but you cannot live on buzz.”

Buzz Doesn’t Conquer All

In the past, talked-about moments were more widely looked at as a happy accident. But today, behind every conversation-starter is a carefully orchestrated plan.

Manufacturing buzz — whether an isolated splash or plugging into particularly talked-about moments like the Cannes Film Festival or the Met Gala — is high on brands’ agendas, said Guillaume Delacroix, the founder of strategy and communications firm DLX.

A viral moment can push a small label to the next level. Coperni’s Spring/Summer 2023 show — where the brand sprayed a liquid fibre dress onto Bella Hadid with materials company Fabrican — catapulted the brand from an insider favourite in its local market to global recognition, said Stefano Martinetto, founder of growth and development platform Tomorrow, which is an investor in the brand.

In the immediate aftermath, viral moments can move items like handbags and shoes, attract a new audience or for young brands attract well-funded collaborators and sponsors for their next show, said Gia Kuan, founder of her namesake New York-based PR firm. After Beyoncé sat front row at client Luar’s Fall/Winter 2024 show in Brooklyn, for example, it saw a sales bump in new regions, she said.

But making it the primary goal can make brands reliant on quick hits of attention that don’t have much meaning.

“In the conversations I have with my clients, it’s just ‘focus on who you are and on having the right positioning and a unique offering,’” said Delacroix. “You cannot build brand desirability on buzz … it lasts the amount of time an Instagram story is up.”

Plus, some may be over-prioritising metrics like earned media value, used by firms including Lefty, Creator IQ and Dash Hudson and media impact value, Launchmetrics’ proprietary measurement, as indicators of overall success. Both use different methodologies to put a dollar value on conversation online and in the media, linked back to what a marketer would’ve had to pay if the placement had been paid.

That data is useful for figuring out what talent to work with, or what event to do a push around, said Lissy von Schwarzkopf, chief business officer of Karla Otto. Share of voice — the percentage of chatter a brand owns in a particular channel — is important because it has a correlation to market share and can provide insight into a brand’s trajectory, said Conor Begley, Creator IQ’s chief strategy officer.

EMV does indeed help a brand discern who is talking about it and the volume of the conversation. But critics say such metrics provide little insight into what people are actually saying and focusing too much on them can lead brands to lose sight of the big picture.

“Metrics can make you make a mistake,” said Pagès. “You get too addicted to things that will easily bring you exposure, not equity or inspiration.”

Even the M&A market is tempering on the idea of buzz, said investor Ariel Ohana, as a more precarious financial market refocuses priorities.

“Right now many buyers are saying ‘give me legacy brands, give me brands that have built perennial brand equity.’ There have been periods of time where people were only looking for what’s the most recent and buzzy brand around,” said Ohana.

The Weight Buzz Carries

For any brand, there’s a line to be walked when it comes to attention. Too little of it, and it doesn’t create desire, too much and it risks oversaturation. With that in mind, reaching the right consumer is imperative, said Mario Ortelli, managing director of luxury advisory Ortelli & Co.

“Brands need to focus on creating connectivity with their consumers. That’s really key in thinking about whether they need to generate a lot of buzz,’” added Alison Bringé, chief marketing officer of analytics platform Launchmetrics. “Is everyone your consumer? Probably not … I think that’s where we get lost.”

For example, the art world influencers Bottega Veneta invites to its shows to talk about the sculpture by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni at the centre of its runway or its set design from architect Gaetano Pesce may not create nearly as much chatter as its Kendall Jenner and A$AP Rocky paparazzi campaign in December, but they make inroads with a specific, high-quality audience, said Wang.

On the talent side, brands are increasingly building long-term relationships with celebrities that project a clear, consistent image of the brand, said von Schwarzkopf. They’re also playing a deeper role in creating cultural moments, said Wang, citing Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson’s designing costumes and dressing the stars of the film “Challengers.”

“It has evolved from brands trying to piggyback off a cultural moment to brands now realising to create the most meaningful buzz they need to be the cultural moment,” said Wang.

What comes next is the most important part.

“[Buzz] creates an energy, but also an expectation,” said von Schwarzkopf. “You always need to think about what you do after.”

Following the women’s shows in February, the second instalment of London Fashion Week’s 40th anniversary celebrations focused on the men’s end of the industry, but, as Caroline Rush, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, said in her remarks at the opening event on Friday morning, this was “not a normal fashion week.” There were panel discussions on the state of the industry, and exhibitions that explored the impact of Black culture, South Asian culture and queer culture on British fashion, alongside a couple of run clubs, a pub quiz and a Northern Soul night. What there wasn’t were many actual clothes. The official schedule for the three days listed a few presentations and four catwalk shows. Definitely not a normal fashion week, even if David Beckham, the BFC’s favourite ambassador, did show up to add his reliably upbeat two pennies’ worth.

But this is scarcely a normal moment for British fashion. Brexit, the Tory government’s experiment in economic suicide, has been especially devastating for local designers. The implosion of online retailer MatchesFashion, which was a lifeline for a lot of those designers, has added to the misery. Then there’s Burberry’s woes: the brand’s logo is a knight in shining armour and Burberry has always seen itself as the noble cream of the British crop, but who’s riding to the rescue now?

“I’m hopeful,” said Charles Jeffrey during a preview before his show on Friday night. “It’s just having to accept where we are.” He didn’t sell to Matches so he dodged that bullet. And he has a devoted, and growing, following in Korea and Japan, which gives him a cushion where others are finding only hard landings. Jeffrey is one of those vaunted graduates of Central St Martins, the anointed few who have defined British fashion at least since John Galliano graduated 40 years ago. “Being at St Martin’s now, there are still things happening, but it’s in a weird way,” he muses. From my perspective — which also happens to cover the four decades of LFW’s existence — there have always been “things happening.” It’s always been cyclical, and even during the frequent downturns, it was usually the weirdnesses that generated the energy and hope. “REBEL: 30 Years of London Fashion,” the exhibition that Sarah Mower curated so dazzlingly at the Design Museum last year, brought dozens of names back into the light, at the same time as it poignantly underscored the brutal attrition rate. But ‘where are they now?’ was answered by ‘at least they were there to begin with’ and none of the other fashion capitals could boast such a rich repertoire of fresh talent.

Which brings me to my reasons to be guardedly cheerful: the week just passed offered 10th anniversary collections from two designers who are living, breathing proof of London’s enduring viability as a seedbed for breathtaking fashion creativity. One was Jeffrey, the other was Craig Green, who showed off-schedule last Wednesday. They’re the most recent wrinkle in the fashion capital’s grand tradition of Apollo vs Dionysus face-offs: Chalayan vs McQueen, Erdem vs Kane, Nicoll vs Saunders. That’s how deep the talent pool has always been. Hell, I could even shoot for the distant sidelines and drag Ossie Clark and Bill Gibb into the ring.

Jeffrey is Loverboy, the Dionysian, the pagan celebrant. He populated the grand courtyard of Somerset House with his tribe past and present acting out a 24-hour narrative that began with one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys in a nightshirt, scalloped boxers and Jeffrey’s signature banana boots and ended with Erin O’Connor at her imperious best in a horned helmet and carapace topping a polka-dotted ballgown plucked from the most glamorous video game you’ve never played, reclaiming the night, the day and everything in between. And that “in between” embraced a fever dream of queerness, historicism, animism and paganism, in glorious thrall to Jeffrey’s idols Westwood and Galliano.

He is riveted by the notion of the worlds our world rests on. To him, London is built on the detritus of Londinium, an ancient world ruled by ritual. A burly youngster marched out in a fig-leafed trompe l’oeil knit of a classical nude statue. There were centurions in armour of soft knit, animal-eared beanies and chunky loafers with metal claws. (Don’t expect to have an easy time in airports, Jeffrey counselled.) St Sebastian, martyred by those very same centurions, showed up in the boys and girls pierced by arrows. They were like suction arrows from a kid’s bow and arrow set, which was a reminder that a sense of childlike play perversely infuses just about everything Jeffrey does. But I’d also swear I saw shades of les tricoteuses, knitting at the foot of the guillotine, in some of the young women who vamped languidly across the courtyard’s cobblestones, pinned with revolutionary rosettes. As Björk used to squeal at her most infectious, bonkers!

And yet there was so much that made pure commercial sense: the heraldic knits, the Fred Perry polos, the mutant banker stripes, the accessories. The polish of the stuff was impressive, with added gloss provided by super stylist Katie Grand. Jeffrey has big plans. Follow on from the Warholian banana motif that is a signature and you’ll find that he nurses dreams of a Warhol-like Factory, a creative nexus of film and music and dance and more. He wants a TV show. He already has a radio show, and a band called NEKO, about to perform live for the first time, though his stage outfit was already on display in “The Lore of Loverboy,” the exhibition that launched the same night as his show. In three rooms — Initiation, Ritual and Manifestation — it tracks Jeffrey’s arc to date, from clubrunner to couturier for pop cultural icons like Tilda Swinton and Harry Styles. The last look is a cardboard suit he made for the photographer Tim Walker, with a crown that reads HOPE.

Jeffrey was born in 1990. Craig Green is four years older. They’re young — and supremely talented — enough to carry the hopes of British fashion on their shoulders, for now at least. And if Charles is the Dionysian showman, Craig is the Apollonian, the apogee of restraint and reason. The role suits his own natural reticence. He’s the very opposite of showy.

It’s been a few years since Green has staged a physical presentation. To mark his 10th anniversary, he decided that his new collection was so personal it made sense to show in his London studio space — as well as off schedule, deliberately unaligned to the increasingly diffuse idea of fashion week. Green confessed he felt intimidated by the thought of strangers in a space that was so private for him, where he spends seven days a week and an unhealthy number of hours a day. “It’s like being in my home,” he claimed. He was still finishing looks when the runway was being painted. But he had enough he wanted to say with these clothes that he felt the invasion was ultimately warranted.

His father died at the end of last year. There was unresolved tension in their relationship between a father’s ideal of a son, a son’s ideal of a father (the show notes rather poetically described it as “the rough grip of inherited codes”), and Green’s efforts to resolve that tension produced an intensely resonant, emotional collection. Appropriate, too, in the current environment. As he said, “I think it’s important now more than ever to offer something new and different, which is kind of what British design is best at: pushing challenging ideas forward during difficult times.”

Green’s stepfather and godfather were in the audience, so father figures were front and centre. But a rumination on paternal influence will never be simple with a thinker as deep and conflicted as Craig Green. One of the key motifs of the collection was a handkerchief, a simple cotton square elevated here into asymmetrical shirts. Like a baby’s bib, he said. Or the sort of thing someone might save as a memento mori when a loved one passes, though Green’s father was, he insisted, never someone who would have used a handkerchief. Nor his grandad. And he himself found the whole idea of a hankie hideously unhygienic. Like I said, nothing ever simple. Tea towels, on the other hand? His dad would have been a tea towel man. So they were subjected to the same transmogrification as the hankies. And they were decorated with tractors and fire engines and cement mixers, motifs from a little boy’s bedroom. Sublimated codes of masculinity enforced early on. But when Green implied corsetry, extending the notion of sublimation, he made everything in padded jersey, as soft as a baby harness.

Harnessing has always been one of his signatures. Here, it was beautifully developed in Ecco leather jackets dissected and reworked endlessly. Green thought of them as a child taking apart his toys and putting them back together, maybe under a father’s tutelage. They reminded me of those anatomical dummies where you can see all the organs layered on top of each other. He has never been afraid of such viscerality, but in reality, they were actually collages of shooting patches, protective patches, functional elements that he saw as beautiful but also dark. Intriguingly, Green felt they referenced the fantasy of a father. Recently, he’s been wondering what it would be like to have kids himself.

As the show went on, an airiness took over: sheer djellabas, knits woven into netting, fringing, floating capes. The idea of a transmogrified tea towel appeared again in strange, beautiful tabards woven from rolled strips of polyester jersey, dissolving. Green found the combination of prosaic and poetic appealing. It also harked back to some of the most moving moments from his own catwalk career, when the soul of his work suggested enchanted nomads, shamans, angels. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Craig Green show had stimulated such fantasies, but this time the angels might also be guardians. I’ll take that as a positive message for the future of British fashion. After all, there’s an election in just under a month and we have to approach the polls with a faith that the demons will begone.

If Shein moves ahead with an initial public offering in the coming days, as it is reportedly preparing to file to do in London, it would be the largest ever for the UK financial capital, and by far the biggest in dollar terms for the fashion industry. The company reports it is growing faster, and is more profitable than Zara owner Inditex, by way of justifying a $64 billion valuation, far more than the market capitalisations of even Kering or Adidas. Yet there will be doubts about whether the deal of the decade will really happen, right up until the moment shares start trading.

The UK government and the country’s financial sector have reportedly lobbied hard for Shein to list in London instead of the more robust New York. The company could certainly benefit from a less-hostile environment. US lawmakers take turns alleging the fast fashion giant’s mostly Chinese supply chain relies on forced labour (Shein denies this), and threatening to close a customs loophole that has helped fuel its growth.

While it’s true that the UK is eager to draw a monster IPO to London’s struggling City, it’s unlikely Shein’s troubles can be contained on the other side of the Atlantic. UK politicians, consumers and investors are, if anything, more attuned to ESG issues — the conservative backlash against “woke” investing is mostly an American phenomenon. Even if Shein avoids any major blowback for labour or environmental reasons, it still needs to come up with an answer to the rise of rival Temu in order to draw investors.

Shein may file its IPO paperwork this week. But whether the company can convince the market to overlook the risks to its business is the $64 billion question.

Men’s Shows in London, Florence and Milan

Men’s shows kicked off this weekend in London. But with many of Britain’s most recognisable designers now showing elsewhere, the season begins in earnest with Marine Serre’s show at Pitti Uomo on Wednesday, then men’s week in Milan starting Friday (along with the usual Italian anchors like Fendi and Prada, a trio of prominent British brands — Martine Rose, Dunhill and JW Anderson — all show there next Sunday; Gucci shows a week from Monday). The menswear market is in flux, with streetwear definitely (probably? maybe? ) over as a dominant force, and a global luxury slowdown casting a pall. The conditions are ripe for someone to set menswear on a new course, but the question is who, and when?

The Week Ahead wants to hear from you! Send tips, suggestions, complaints and compliments to brian.baskin@businessoffashion.com.