What comes to mind when you think of the term ‘Fashion Week’? Is it the models strutting down the ramps, the spectacular clothes they’re wearing, or the star-studded seats along the runway? For hardcore fashion enthusiasts and casual viewers alike, it is just as much the people in attendance as the show itself that give fashion shows their allure.
In fashion's recent history, front row guests have regularly delivered some of fashion week’s most iconic moments. After all, who can forget that historic 2018 Richard Quinn LFW show, when the late Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was photographed in the front row (alongside Anna Wintour, no less)?
Historically, fashion shows were intimate events exclusively hosted for high-profile clients and elite industry insiders. Today, they’re global spectacles anyone can access through screens. From celebrities entering the front row in the 2000s to the introduction of new players with the advent of social media, fashion shows have evolved far beyond their origins as private events reserved for those in the upper echelons of both fashion and society.
After the democratization of these fashion shows, in part brought about by the digital age, the once-exclusive “front row” (or FROW) has become more than just a status symbol. Today, these spaces are powerful promotional vehicles that can significantly dictate a show’s success.
This shift has redefined how access to these seats is earned and how fashion houses decide who gets to grace their highly coveted FROWs. As the fashion industry increasingly treats these events as strategic marketing platforms, it raises the question of how these guest lists are planned.
Who gets to sit in the front row and why? How much does your choice of attendees impact your event’s ROI?
This article aims to address all these pressing questions, exploring how much social media influences these fashion shows and identifying the metrics that dictate the fashion week crowd.
To analyze fashion shows as commercial events, we must first examine their costs. Organizing a luxury event as prestigious and glamorous as a fashion week show can cost a pretty penny. Brands need assurance that these financial and resource expenses yield sufficient returns. But unlike the fashion parades of yesteryear, where designers would display their collections to direct buyers, today’s fashion shows deliver returns in a more ambiguous way. When proceeds can no longer be measured through direct sales, organizers have to turn to less tangible indicators for evaluating their returns. In comes fashion week’s most meaningful social media metric: the Earned Media Value.
EMV is a performance metric that directly assigns monetary value to all unpaid publicity, including third-party mentions and organic engagements. In short, EMV takes these unpaid exposures and calculates how much it would cost to achieve the same impact through paid advertising. This metric has simplified luxury event tracking by providing a quantifiable monetary value to evaluate social media performance.
For fashion houses to calculate their ROI, the Earned Media Value generated by a front-row guest must be evaluated against the cost of their seats (i.e., the total monetary and resource expenses per seat). With the average fashion show seating a little over 100 people in the front row, the seating arrangement becomes an intricate chess match. To make every seat count, organizers have to be strategic with who they place in their front rows. Through EMV, brands can predict which fashion influencer would generate the most organic value and structure their guest lists accordingly.
If we look at the recent Fall/Winter 2026 Fashion Week, all the Big Four fashion weeks were dominated by Asian fashion influencers. From actors and musicians to digital creators, stars from across Asia dazzled every show’s front row.
From a Western lens, this guest list may seem puzzling at first. You’d expect these valuable spots to be exclusively reserved for A-list Hollywood stars and mega-influencers. However, when you judge this list against the Earned Media Value generated by these stars, everything clicks into place.
According to data released by Lefty, these Asian stars far outperform Western influencers in terms of media value.
From K-pop stars like Mingyu Kim and Karina to Thai actors like Orm Kornnaphat and Lingling Kwong, it was these APAC influencers who brought in the majority of fashion week’s organic exposure.
For instance, Thai actress Orm Kornnaphat achieved a 104.2% engagement rate during Paris Fashion Week, generating a staggering $23.4M in EMV for Dior. These numbers give you all the information you need to put these invitation lists into perspective.
With most fashion shows lasting only 10-15 minutes, there’s only so much content you can get out of the presentation itself. However, documenting the road leading up to the show is the real moneymaker (or, more specifically, the EMV-maker).
Social media tastemakers excel at generating hype around an event multiple days in advance. In light of this, many fashion houses have been sending out extravagant invites that conveniently serve as PR packages for fashion influencers to film.
For example, the invitation to Dior’s Paris Fashion Week show held at the picturesque Tuileries Garden came with something special – a ruff collar for menswear invites, and a miniature pair of Tuileries’ iconic Sénat chairs for womenswear. Other memorable keepsake invitations, such as Jacquemus’s comb and Chloe’s dandelion paperweight, also did the rounds across social media this season.
By alluding to the show’s location or collection, these invites give you a sense of what to expect. More importantly, these Instagrammable packages can be powerful promotional tools for creating hype around an upcoming show. The fact that Dior topped the PFW chart in EMV performance after their invitations blew up on social media is no coincidence.
If there’s one thing we can learn from the social media buzz surrounding fashion week (or any other luxury event, for that matter), it’s this: the fashion show itself is entirely secondary to the journey leading up to it. Social media users can easily browse collections in magazines or brand catalogs; what viewers find fascinating is the exclusive backstage experience.
Behind-the-scenes content, such as GRWM hotel-room conversations with celebrities and influencers, often generates more engagement than runway content. Here’s why: these videos can tell authentic, interactive stories that go beyond what a 10-minute fashion show can offer. For users at home experiencing these events from the comfort of their couches, either through live streams or social media posts, these videos provide a deeper sense of the full fashion week experience.
Social media users are less interested in watching models walk down runways than they are in going along for the ride as their favorite stars prepare for the big event.
Like every other star-studded event, the real show at a fashion event doesn’t begin and end inside the venue. From the moment your front row guests arrive, you have an entrancing show worthy of social media attention.
These arrival scenes provide the ideal material for social media content – they show you which stars and influencers are showing up, what they’re wearing, and who they’ve arrived with. From snippets of them posing for the media to their interactions outside the venue, the greater part of the spectacle unfolds before the show even begins.
Like fashion critics and elite tastemakers of the pre-social-media era, today's fashion influencers have the power to shape how the public perceives your collection. The only difference is that instead of letting you wait several days for detailed analysis and write-ups, many of these social media influencers will document and share their reactions in real time.
Considering how fast-paced our current digital landscape is, these live reactions are instrumental in setting the tone for long-term critical receptions before the buzz dies down.
When it comes to social media marketing, no luxury brand does it better than Jacquemus. Launched in 2009, the brand first captured mainstream attention in 2011 with a guerrilla marketing stunt in which Simon Porte Jacquemus and his friends crashed Vogue’s “Fashion’s Night Out” event on Avenue Montaigne. The brand’s progress since then has been nothing short of astronomical.
The secret behind Jacquemus’s trajectory – going from an indie brand founded by a 19-year-old fashion school dropout to a multi-million-dollar household name in a little over a decade – is worth digging into.
Much like the publicity stunt that earned Jacquemus its first mainstream exposure, the brand’s growth can be attributed to its unmatched marketing prowess. With social media aiding the journey, this luxury brand has made its mark in fashion through a series of viral marketing tactics.
From their scroll-stopping surrealistic campaigns, such as CGI videos of their giant Bambino bags coasting the streets of Paris, to collaborating with internet sensations like TikTok’s beloved ‘Bus Aunty’, Bemi Orojuogun, Jacquemus’s marketing team speaks social media like natives.
Their fashion week performance is no different.
Back in 2019, Jacquemus stole the social media spotlight with its iconic Le Coup de Soleil Spring/Summer 2020 show, an unforgettable visual feast set amongst the lavender fields of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
This historic show, marking the brand’s 10th Anniversary, set a new standard for Jacquemus’s fashion show locations. Following the media sensation surrounding this runway, the brand kept the momentum going with breathtaking locations for its next shows.
From the 600-meter-long serpentine wooden runway laid across the wheat fields of France to the raw, visually captivating salt marshes of Aigues-Mortes, the brand’s unique locations continued to dominate our social media feeds.
Simon Porte Jacquemus doesn’t just stage fashion shows to display his collections; he creates beautiful spectacles designed to capture attention through screens.
In the same vein, if it isn’t spectacular locations, the brand’s marketing skills shine through in other content-worthy stunts, such as the ‘toast’ invitation that went viral back in 2023.
Jacquemus knows where the value lies, and he uses social media to steer attention towards his shows in the most inventive ways.
Since social media is where trends take shape, every fashion brand is vying for the exposure these spaces can provide. However, translating raw social media performance data into measurable financial returns can get complicated. Without accurate data showing the monetary value of these intangible outcomes, brands have no way to tell whether their fashion week expenditures generated any profit. For an accurate ROI calculation, the money invested to make your event a success – from filling your front rows with buzzworthy faces to organizing a sensational presentation that gets people talking – has to be weighed against a concrete return value. This concern about interpretation has made Earned Media Value the go-to metric for luxury event tracking.
Through social media marketing platforms like Influencity, businesses can put a dollar sign on their social media buzz by evaluating the EMV generated by an event. This metric turns abstract internet attention into quantifiable monetary figures, giving you the information you need to measure and predict the returns of your fashion week investments.
Organizing a luxury event, such as a fashion show, requires significant financial investment. In recent years, social media has served as the number-one hub for generating returns on these investments. From NYFW marketing to gala promotions, businesses and event organizers often turn to these digital spaces to create hype and evaluate outcomes. However, since quantifying your social media performance in real monetary terms isn’t always straightforward, influencer marketing platforms now offer a solution: the Earned Media Value metric. Rather than blindly analyzing raw social media performance data, businesses can use this metric to assess the monetary value their events and campaigns generated.
Jacquemus’s swift rise to the top can be attributed to its unrivaled marketing aptitude for generating social media hype.
Earned Media Value (EMV) provides a clear overview of your returns by assigning real monetary value to your organic social media exposure.
While there is no universal formula for calculating EMV, the calculation typically looks like this:
EMV = (Reach + Impressions) x Cost per Mille + (Total interactions) x Cost per Engagement
This article provides a more detailed breakdown of this metric.
Using social media marketing platforms like Influencity can help you track performance and calculate EMV in real time. These platforms also help you predict campaign outcomes by showing you an influencer’s estimated EMV based on their recent activity.
Knowing an influencer’s EMV is crucial for accurate return predictions, fair negotiations, and smart budget allocations.