Impact of Social Media on Fashion Industry

Social media began in 1997 with the website Six Degrees which allowed users to create profiles and then friend other users whom they wished to. By the year 2000, over 100 million people had access to the internet and social media was on the rise as people, more frequently, began using a variety of chat rooms to make friends, date and discuss a wide range of topics. It wasn’t until the year of 2003, after the creation of the social networking website Myspace, that social media began to grow and attract more people leading to the creation of Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006 and Instagram in 2010; to date, Facebook is the leading social networking site with around 2,070,000,000 monthly users, followed by Youtube with 1,500,000,000 monthly users and Instagram with 800,000 monthly users. Over time, social media has begun to influence and help develop a variety of different industries in the modern world with its accessibility to large numbers of people, of all ages, at one time. Social media has had a large influence on 3 trillion-dollar fashion industry helping to promote products and boost profits. Even though on the surface the impact of social media on the fashion industry may appear positive, it has destroyed many businesses, some leading to violence. This is essay will address the use of social proofing, choice of models, false advertising and racism within the industry and how the use of social media has impacted it.

For this project, I used a range of sources from the internet including articles from BBC news and Adweek. Founded in 1983, many of my statistics are from the British Fashion Council, an organization with ‘aims to further the interests of the British fashion industry and its designer businesses by harnessing and sharing collective knowledge, experience, and resources of the sector’.

In an era dominated by social media marketing, social media has a positive influence on the fashion industry and holds the power to boost profits for many businesses through the psychological and social phenomenon of social proofing. Social proofing is where people assume the actions of others reflect correct behavior in a given situation; this is arguably one of the largest psychological triggers in marketing as, no matter how strong-minded a person may believe they are, social media has the power to impact without people being aware. One of the main goals of anyone involved in the fashion industry whether it be the designers of the clothing brand or the models who carry and promote the brand is to keep up with trends as fashion is all about the visuals and aesthetics. The industry uses their platforms in social media to vastly promote their businesses