Fashion PR's TikTok Torment; Final NY Show & Party Recaps
At last, Leonardo DiCaprio emerges from the shadows to touch Gigi Hadid on the shoulder. WOWOW.
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The TikTok-induced headache for fashion week PR people.
Recaps of Michael Kors, Tom Ford, and Tory Burch.
A rapid-fire party recap, featuring LEO AND GIGI.
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First, About That Whole TikTok Thing…
Creators on TikTok made videos about how to get into New York Fashion Week. Some of them got a lot of views. The videos drew attention to publicly available lists of public relations people’s email addresses, which were posted on NYFW.com in order for show requests to be placed with the correct person (the site appears to have been taken down, maybe just because the event has ended). Tiff Baira made one such video that, as of publication time, has more than 370,000 views.
Similar videos followed. Sydney Bernhardt posted the link to the email addresses in her bio and directed viewers to it (her video has fewer than 10,000 views). The collective efforts of some fashion TikTokers to make videos against a search term (“how to get into fashion week”), because that’s what TikTok likes now, resulted in some PR people getting inundated with emails from members of the public.
Fashion PR Lindsey Solomon told The Cut’s Danya Issawi that he got “three to four times as many” emails as he usually gets for fashion week requests as a result of his publicly listed email address getting extra attention from social media. He received more than a thousand emails, he said, after he spent a full day offline. His reaction:
“I’ll be perfectly honest, I feel doxxed,” he said. “Where the email is so out of left field, so random, it’s like, How did you get my email?”
If you believe “doxxing” involves disseminating personal information about someone in order to bring harm to them, rather than drawing attention to a business email address that was listed on a public website, you might think this is a liberal use of the term. However, I see what he’s saying: what happened is obviously annoying. It’s not like all of these brands and PR firms are so well-funded or staffed, and fashion week is a really busy time as it is. It probably wasn’t individual PR people’s ideas to have their email addresses pooled and listed on NYFW.com.
Yet these videos don’t seem to have been made with malicious intent, but rather a spirit of one, getting TikTok views, and two, helping the non-industry community penetrate the gilded rails surrounding the fashion establishment. (However, one model who saw these TikTok videos told The Cut he just walked right into Vogue World, which sounds like an old-fashioned crashing versus taking malicious advantage of having access to a list of emails.)
I have three takeaways from this:
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