Luxury fashion is seeing most engagement among Twitter users, handmade and custom fashion are seeing a substantial rise, meta fashion has entered the wider cultural consciousness registering a mindboggling 1500% growth, and diversity has become a talking point. And all this while, the use of “sustainability” as a keyword has taken a sharp dip.
- All these trends have been revealed in a new report titled The Fashion Industry's New Era. Social media intelligence firm Meltwater has released this report based on Twitter data, and highlights the trends in the fashion industry that marketers and advertisers would care about in 2022 and beyond.
The project: Released in partnership with Twitter, this report explores the conversation drivers around top-trending fashion topics on Twitter over the past year—including luxury fashion, meta fashion, handmade fashion, inclusive fashion and retro fashion—as well as ways that brands can stay ahead when it comes to responding to these conversations.
The emerging trends:
- Luxury and high-end fashion conversations grew more than other top-performing fashion topics, like athleisure and fast fashion. High-end fashion conversations are flourishing on Twitter, and have grown 16.7% between March 2021 and February 2022. With an average of 20,000 mentions per day, this category saw the largest increase in mentions compared to other verticals like athleisure, fast fashion, and street style.
- The highest spike in engagement occurred on July 8, 2021 thanks to Louis Vuitton tweets promoting designer Virgil Abloh’s Fall-Winter 2021 fashion show featuring Korean boyband BTS.
- Some 57.2% of all luxury fashion tweet authors are actors, designers, and models. Singers and producers made up 16.5% of luxury fashion tweet authors, while bloggers and writers comprised 16.1%.
- The rise of conversations about meta fashion reflects how the metaverse, VR, and AR have entered the wider cultural consciousness. There was a 1,518% increase of meta fashion mentions during the period.
- Though NFTs have made a huge impact on the fashion industry over the past year, the analysis found that conversations about meta fashion grew much more sharply. NFT-fashion grew 351.8% in comparison.
- The volume of meta fashion conversations started to grow in December 2021, the month Nike acquired RTFKT, a digital sneaker brand.
- Athletes and luxury fashion in particular drive meta fashion tweets and engagement, drawing a unique cross-section of sports, tech, and style fans that spend slightly more time online than the average person.
- Conversations about handmade and custom fashion command the sustainable fashion category, showing this audience’s eagerness to put their consumer power behind specific solutions.
- There was a 9.3% increase of handmade fashion keyword mentions during the period. The mentions for "sustainability" fell 11.6% during the period.
- Makers and entrepreneurs lead handmade fashion Twitter conversations. More than half of those involved are designers, creators, entrepreneurs, founders, jewellery designers, and CEOs. Writers and bloggers make up another 32.7%.
- When it comes to buying decisions, this audience is most influenced by their friends and family—not celebrity influencers as is the case for other consumer segments mentioned in the report—and think through their buying decisions carefully.
- Whereas gender-fluid, genderless, and gender-diverse styles were major talking points in previous years, the inclusive fashion conversation is also growing with other considerations around size, disability, and price points.
- There was a 7% increase of inclusive fashion mentions during the timeframe. At the moment, conversations about Y2K fashion outpace all, while ‘50s and ‘60s clothes have fallen out of vogue.
- The retro and vintage fashion query found that the top keyword in this conversation was the phrase “out this listing,” as in “check out this listing,” used by small business owners to direct followers to their Etsy, Depop, and Poshmark stores.
- The pieces that retro and vintage customers are talking about most are dresses, jeans, and designer collections, according to the social listening research. Some of this audience’s most retweeted Tweets suggest that they value legacy, fashion history, and paying homage to the past.
The research: The study analysed global tweets from 28 February 2021 and 1 March 2022.
- Meltwater analysed more than 310 million tweets to understand the Twitter fashion community.
