Above, guests at Monday's rain-making Burberry Prorsum women's Autumn/Winter 2012 collection at London Fashion Week including will.i.am praise the brand for being not only fashion- but digital-forward, while Vogue's Anna Wintour praises designer Christopher Bailey for bringing polish and global sophistication to British fashion. Check out the runway show below.Continue reading...

Brands are ‘pinning’ it on Pinterest with increasing savvy, and although the site doesn’t carry advertising or sponsored content, publishers and brands are quickly getting hip to how to leverage the social thirst for sharing images to drive awareness and traffic to their own digital touchpoints.

With estimates of 18.7 million unique visitors in March, (according to comScore), “Pinterest has a message for the media: a picture is worth a thousand words," notes today's New York Times, or given Twitter's 140-character message limit, "about seven Twitter posts.”

Whole Foods, West Elm, Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, Gilt Home,  L.L.Bean, and even the National Pork Board are all early Pinterest adopters in what comScore VP Andrew Lipsman calls “the rise of the visual Web.” As he comments to the Times, “Pinterest is creating sort of a meritocracy of what’s visually appealing. Brands are scrambling and trying to figure it out. They know it’s going to be big, but they don’t necessarily know the best way to use it.” Well, they're starting to figure it out.Continue reading...

As Fashion Week moves from New York to London, Burberry will once again stream the Burberry Prorsum Womenswear Autumn/Winter runway show.

Watch the brand's highly anticipated London Fashion Week show live at 4pm GMT on Monday at Burberry.com and on Facebook, and be among the first to see the new collection backstage by following @Burberry for #Tweetwalk sneak peeks on Monday 20 February, starting at 4pm GMT.

Burberry chief creative officer Christopher Bailey is also interacting with fans on Facebook around the collection, demonstrating (yet again) the digital savvy that just won the brand International Retailer of the Year honors. Watch Bailey's pre-show message below.Continue reading...

Levi's launched its first ever global collection during its Fashion Week debut this week. At its New York Fashion Week show, held in Soho, models were shown getting dressed, riding bikes and other vignettes from daily life in addition to walking the runway in key looks from its first official Fall/Winter 2012 collection.

The collection (by head designers Jonathan Kirby and Jill Guenza; see their inspiration boards here) is "based on a more refined and tailored look, for both men and women. The designs were inspired by the idea of craftsmanship, honesty and authenticity — honoring tradition while defying convention, redefining the norm and re-crafting and re-creating iconic Levi's styles."Continue reading...

New York Giants Super Bowl champion Victor Cruz cut the ribbon today in a kick-off event for New York's Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, now gearing up to debut Fall 2012 collections starting Thursday morning at Lincoln Center.

There's also a whirlwind of virtual activity in what the HighLow blog calls "the most egalitarian" New York Fashion Week yet, including a Facebook invitation to RSVP to live-streams of the runway shows and join the conversation on Twitter via the #liverunway hashtag.

YouTube and Maybelline will once again sponsor a real-time YouTube channel that will bring 30 of the Fall 2012 runway shows to the world. The runway videos will also be archived at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week YouTube channel.

Cover Girl is partnering with Polyvore and the Fashion Institute of Technology on Polyvore.com/Live, which will see four FIT grads debut their collections to an audience of fashion insiders and bloggers: Lauren Bagliore, Vengsarkar “Ven” Budhu, Sergio Guadarrama, and Dana-Maxx Pomerantz.Continue reading...

President Obama has returned to e-commerce and haute couture with Runway to Win, a collaborative campaign merchandise fundraiser pegged to the kickoff of New York Fashion Week. As fashionistas rev up for the Fall 2012 collections, designers and Dem supporters have been rallying to raise money, chicly, for the president's re-election campaign.

The collection features patriotic clothing and accessories, moderately priced from $45 to $95, from top designers including Tory Burch, Rachel Roy, Derek Lam, Beyoncé and Tina Knowles, Marcus Wainwright and David Neville, Proenza Schouler's Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Diane von Furstenberg, Narciso Rodriguez, Vera Wang, Thakoon, Jason Wu, Grace Tsao-Wu and Laura Kofoid of Laudi Vindi, Marc Jacobs and Tracy Reese.Continue reading...

Second only to China, India continues its rise as a very desirable emerging market. With the cool-down of Western economies, global brand marketers are aggressively seeking out new opportunities in India. Marketers of luxury goods have had a tough time making their presence known, however. As noted here, outlets for luxury brands are scarce in India, because there are few centers of luxury. Instead, luxury brands are sold primarily in top luxury hotels or in a handful of exclusive malls.

That may be why Saloni Lodha, an up and coming Indian designer based in London, is using a different tactic: She is trying to put a luxury spin on the fact that her clothing line carries the "Made in India" label. Lodha recently told Agence France-Presse, "I have great faith in the made-in-India idea, and wanted to see an Indian, made-in-India brand in the world's best stores."

If anyone can pull it off, it is likely to be this thirty-year old.Continue reading...

Fashion brands showing Autumn/Winter 2012 menswear collections in Milan over the weekend include New York-based John Varvatos, who highlighted his love of the Big Apple, and Burberry Prorsum, Emporio Armani, Prada — which used celeb models including Adrien Brody and Gary Oldman — and Calvin Klein, below.Continue reading...