PFW Sees Spike in Audience Figures

French fashion’s organizing body said the videos produced for the event received

153.5 million views on its partner platforms.

PARIS — The organizers of Paris Fashion Week have released audience figures indicating a sharp uptick in interest in its most recent event, reflecting its digital acceleration in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode also said it has opened accreditations for the next men’s fashion week, scheduled to take place from Jan. 19 to 24, and haute couture week, from Jan. 25 to 28, though it provided no additional detail on the format of the shows, as France remains under lockdown in a bid to limit the spread of COVID-19.

The videos produced by brands registered on the official calendar of the most recent PFW, held between Sept. 28 and Oct. 6, drew a combined audience of 153.5 million views on its partner platforms. That includes 135 million views on YouTube and 18.5 million cumulative views on Weibo, Tencent Video and WeChat, French fashion’s organizing body said on Thursday.

This represented a sharp increase versus the combined haute couture and men’s fashion weeks in July, which were the first to be held online after physical fashion shows were cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

At the time, the organizers said the videos produced for events listed on the official calendar, held between July 6 and July 13, drew a combined audience of 19.4 million views on its partner platforms, including 5.6 million views on YouTube and 13.8 million on Weibo, Tencent Video and Bilibili.

This time around, the videos were a mix of original content and livestreamed fashion shows, as 17 houses staged runway displays. A further 19 held physical presentations, and 46 opted for exclusively digital events, according to the official tally.

All the content was available on fhcm.paris, the platform developed by the federation in partnership with the data research and insights company Launchmetrics. The site was fine-tuned to improve its navigability, clarify the calendar page and make the magazine section more fluid.

Launchmetrics estimated the Media Impact Value of this season at $123 million, compared with $65.1 million in July. This was down 31 percent versus the same period last year, when the MIV of Paris Fashion Week totaled $179.3 million.

As reported, the digital hub for PFW drew a total of 230,000 visitors, up from 202,000 for the July season, and tallied 606,000 page views, up from 490,000 in July.

The federation focused on amplifying the content with a network of partners including Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Hylink, Canal Plus, The New York Times and The Asahi Shimbun. The latter three cumulated 1.5 million pages viewed on their respective platforms, it said.