Ready-to-wear brands dress in magazine format

In a sector where new images are constantly emerging, especially on social networks, the escape is intriguing. At the start of January, the Bottega Veneta brand, which has been taking the industry into the spotlight for a few months with its avant-garde pieces with hedonistic accents – bags of braided leather or with flashy golden chain, knits and mini-dresses, pointed shoes or squares with a strong personality. -, simply deleted his Instagram account, without farewell for his 2.5 million subscribers. On February 24, same withdrawal of the Chinese social network Weibo. ” No comment “, evaded, in response to requests for explanation, the communications department.

Then, on March 31, the house of the Kering group unveiled its secret weapon: a digital magazine. Baptized Issued by Bottega, it comes in the form of a site to which you must devote a good twenty-five minutes if you want to browse its 132 pages. You can find photo series (signed by leading artists, such as Senta Simond or Walter Pfeiffer), video clips (from the inflation of balloons to an appearance by rapper Missy Elliott), handmade drawings, 3D animations.

All interspersed … with Bottega Veneta advertising pages, almost like in a “real” print magazine. At the end of March, the artistic director Daniel Lee justified at Guardian this rocker : ” I spend a lot of time thinking about what I do, and social media “oversimplifies” everything. ” To the “zine” to give back time and depth to its subject …

No doubt about the promotional nature

Bottega Veneta thus joins a cohort of fashion and luxury brands and e-commerce platforms – Chanel, Vuitton, Dior, Loewe, COS, Net-a-Porter, Ssense – which, for the past ten years, have prided themselves on own their own publication, in newsprint, glossy or online. While the traditional paperweight struggles, finding that it inspires so much is not lacking in irony.

“After all, both fashion and magazines follow the same logic: to state a point of view on the world periodically. »Alice Litscher, professor at the French Fashion Institute

But in this area, which remains that of communication, you can find everything: magazines sold in newsstands, newspapers slipped into the shopping bag at the checkout and which look like classic fashion magazines, eulogies intended for loyal customers and which leave no doubt as to the promotional nature of the published product.

You have 82.88% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.