Special Report: Brand Livestream
Jordan Kelley, Content Director, BrandStorytelling.tv
SPOTLIGHT
Highlighting Impactful Live Streaming
Celebrity/Influencer: Various creators, designers, and performers, including Gus Van Sant, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, Jeremy Harris, Florence Welch, and more
Brand: Gucci
Platform: GucciFest.com, YouTube, Weibo
Potential Reach: 2M+
Time: November 16 - 22
Today, fashion and film fans everywhere can tune into GucciFest for a viewing experience that combines elements of a traditional film festival with a fashion launch. GucciFest is the first of its kind – a fashion brand elevating a typical line release by capturing the clothing in the framework of a story told on film, viewable to millions in their homes via steaming of a week-long festival. Films and episodes of “Ouverture of Something That Never Ended” will be available to view daily at GucciFest.com, while also streaming on the Gucci YouTube Channel, YouTube’s Fashion & Beauty Hub, and Weibo. The project is helmed by Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele, with the Ouverture miniseries directed by Michele and acclaimed director Gus Van Sant.
The GucciFest.com website was created expressly for the festival, allowing visitors to navigate to each of the daily selections that will be screened. Gucci linked to the site in their announcement of the online fashion festival, using a QR code in social posts to allow users to navigate to the fest site. The QR code was also plastered in physical locations in New York, London, and Milan announcing the festival. In addition to the bespoke site, streaming on both Gucci’s channel and the YouTube Fashion & Beauty channel are sure to garner views. Gucci’s solo channel boasts over 600K subscribers; combine that with the additional 1.31M subscribers tuned in to YouTube’s Fashion & Beauty vertical and it’s clear to see GucciFest is poised to have a massive audience. Lastly there’s Chinese microblogging site Weibo, which rounds out the fest’s reach, sure to bring the festival a truly international audience.
While a fashion film festival is new for not only Gucci but anyone, the luxury brand has been at the forefront of maximizing its digital presence, making GucciFest feel a natural part of the brand’s continued expansion in the online space. Gucci’s cultivated its brand voice and made it accessible to all in the "Inside The House" section of the brand's website, which treats viewers to behind the scenes content, photography, and films. The leap being made here is the one to streaming and video, using tools like Instagram Reels to announce the festival and making it available to view live on multiple platforms. The structure of the festival gives viewers the opportunity to tune in every day for the next piece of the series, creating an opportunity for conversation around the festival. Before and after episodes of Michele and Van Sant’s “Ouverture” are additional pieces of content. Each additional creator’s work features designs by up and coming designers carefully selected by Alessandro Michele himself.
GucciFest represents a creative and artful approach to a unique problem – the inability to host a live, traditional runway experience to announce an upcoming collection. Like many of the solutions that have had to be enacted in the face of the global pandemic, GucciFest likely would have never been considered under traditional circumstances, but in the face of hardship comes forced innovation. This forced innovation, one that merges a traditional fashion launch with an artful and elevated approach to livestreaming, is an elegant solution that gives designers, creatives, and filmmakers alike a chance to work and a chance to shine.
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