MySpace’s New Chic Clique

Since its launch in 2003, social-networking site MySpace (NWS) has been associated with music fans, as well as teens and twentysomethings seeking to meet or contact friends online, but now the site hopes to court another trendy group: fashionistas. On Aug. 28, MySpace launches a fashion community just in time for the spring 2008 runway shows that will take place during New York’s Fashion Week, Sept. 5-12.

The move reflects MySpace’s strategy of identifying the communities of interest that have grown organically and the building official member communities around them, turning once-grassroots groups into content platforms for old-media companies and consumer brands. But will the top-down approach work? And if so, who will be the big winners — the established corporations or the unknown designers trying to make their names among peer-driven social networks?

Pairing Partner and User Content

These are the questions that surround MySpace’s fashion community, whose no-frills beta-version launch last September was timed to coincide with the 2006 New York Fashion Week shows. The new, redesigned landing page is appropriately stylish. It features a highly textured set of images, including a price-tag graphic featuring a daily fashion trend and tactile images of fabric swatches. In addition, a series of video screens of varying shapes shows interviews with bands and stars — including actress/musician Hilary Duff — who talk about their own dressing habits. Slick content from big-media partners such as InStyle magazine, including behind-the-scenes footage of photo shoots and how-to guides for applying makeup, is positioned near user-generated videos submitted by aspiring designers.

But the site didn’t always look so, well, fashionable. And earlier this summer, some MySpace members seemed perplexed as to the purpose of the newly formed online community. Back in June, 14-year-old Brittany wrote, "hey this myspace fashion is totally cool but whats [sic] the whole point for it?"

According to Todd Dufour, director of MySpace’s marketing department, the point is that users were already forming groups devoted to clothing brands — now MySpace is just making the process easier. Just as they helped nurture the music and comedy sites, MySpace spent a year developing the fashion site’s home page.

"There are 165,000 members of the Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) group," Dufour says, referring to the casual clothing chain, counting numbers that appeared before the launch of the MySpace fashion community. "And there are 74,000 fashion-related groups already."

Where’s the Payoff? So what’s in it for MySpace? Presumably, the relationships the company’s developing with established media properties, such as Time’s (TWX) InStyle magazine, which partnered with the social-networking site during the beta period and has since expanded its video offerings.

"InStyle approached us, as did Conde Nast [Publications]," says Dufour, of the two partners. He won’t discuss the financial details of either deal, which establish MySpace as a nonexclusive platform for the magazines’ content.

"Publishers are trying to figure out how to bring their brands online, how to appeal to our demographics," he explains. With nearly 70 million unique visitors per month, MySpace offers these magazines an additional way to market to online audiences beyond their own branded Web sites. How effective partnering with MySpace will be, in terms of direct revenue from subscription or single-copy sales, has yet to be seen.

Marketing Designers, Old and New

Fashion magazines aren’t the only businesses that stand to benefit from MySpace’s new community. Some of the fashion world’s most respected names have already been tapping into MySpace to find new modeling talent, to crowd-source for ideas, and to raise brand awareness.

Ultrachic British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose label is owned by Gucci Group, last year used MySpace to cast models and photographers for a catwalk show and for ads for his lower-priced line, McQ. Also in 2006, New York-based Donna Karan’s moderately priced DKNY Jeans line sponsored a T-shirt design contest on MySpace. The winning T-shirt design was featured in a music video for the popular band The White Stripes this year.

Designers such as Isaac Mizrahi, who designs a luxe line sold in upscale boutiques such as Bergdorf Goodman in addition to a budget line for Target (TGT), regularly update their personal MySpace pages with details about their own creative processes and tastes. Mizrahi includes unknown MySpace designers alongside his celebrity "friends" to nurture a creative community around his brand.

"When a designer offers access and intimacy, he allows a sense of belonging with his audience," says Shawn Gold, MySpace’s senior vice-president of marketing. "They can create a network of mutual appreciation."

Nurturing New Talent

But some observers see the unknown designers as the biggest potential beneficiaries of the new MySpace fashion community.

"If I were a young and up-and-coming designer, I would totally do MySpace. It’s a cost-effective way to gain brand awareness and build an audience," says Patricia Pao of the Pao Principle, a branding and marketing consultancy that advises fashion brands. In other words, MySpace has the potential to possibly do for fledgling, self-promoting clothing designers what it does for ambitious, unsigned musicians — offer them a no-cost Web site with social-networking and video-sharing capabilities. Fashion is, after all, a visual and social business in which peer recommendations of products are greatly valued, especially among teens and young adults. MySpace could prove to be a fun and effective stage for rising-star designers just as it has been for bands.

There’s been skepticism about the upside for established brands, however. A piece published in Advertising Age in July suggested that MySpace’s fashion community might be a mismatch for high-end brands such as Chanel, which provided runway video for the beta version of the site. Chanel is upscale, while MySpace is known for twentysomethings posting party photos and searching for dates.

There’s Money in Those Demographics

But the most recent comScore data available [from July, 2007] on MySpace’s demographics suggest it does have a mature, upscale clientele. The majority of MySpace members are 35 years old and older [32,192,000 total unique visitors in this age bracket per month], followed by 25-34 [12,147,000], and 18-24 [11,871,000]. While most MySpace members have household incomes of $40,000 to $59,999, the number of those with household incomes of $100,000 or more number 15,641,000, according to the comScore data.

This data shows that MySpace members are older and more sophisticated than most marketers might think. And those marketers also might find a sophisticated new use for the site: trolling through this focused area of MySpace for a quick and direct way to see what style-conscious consumers of all ages are wearing, buying, listening to, and discussing. Inviting them to be "friends," rather than simply marketing [via, say, promotional pages or ads] to these MySpace members could prove valuable for established designers and marketing executives.

MySpace could conceivably compete with pricey, online fashion-research services such as the Worth Global Style Network and Stylesight. These sites, which charge fees from around $2,000 to $20,000 — and sometimes more — to fashion-forward companies such as Target, provide digital photographs of runway shows around the globe, snapshots of street fashion and store windows in stylish cities such as Tokyo and New York, and analytical reports of trends.

"You can see what’s trendy in Seattle, vs. Chicago — what regional style is, on MySpace," says Dufour. "It can definitely tie into broad fashion research."

But unlike the high-end trend-tracking sites, MySpace’s fashion community is for the large part unedited, beyond the paid content from designers and magazines. An open-ended, free-for-all forum on style, this section of MySpace promises to be as unpredictable as fashion itself.