Today, our PR intern Laura embraces her inner Gaga with a garland of handcrafted pom poms and an eighties side ponytail Madonna in her heyday would have been proud of. 

Perfectly paired with feline 50’s sunglasses, some people may see the world with rose tinted glasses but when it comes to Miss Cake life is lovely in lavender. 

Folk in the Smoke

It's just over a week until our much anticipated Folk in the Smoke event. Being dedicated followers (and occasionally wearers) of fashion, we're putting on our glad rags to celebrate London Fashion Week. On the 21st February we're taking to the Stand Gallery in London to celebrate all things digital, e-commerce and of course style. A few tickets remain so don't forget to RSVP here today http://folkdigital.eventbrite.com/

Expect great guests, great music and great 'Fash Offs'. Fashion Week wouldn't be Fashion Week without a goodie bag so come along for Dorset inspired treats and great conversation over a glass of wine.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Are you Tautz?

Issa London's Show Gets Digital

Last week we launched the fabulous new digital flagship  for Issa London just in time for London Fashion Week. The e-commerce website however meant that Issa women could do more than just shop; they could watch the latest show as it  happened. Together with Folk Digital, on Saturday night Issa London streamed their S/S 2013 show live from London-a first for the brand. The live stream through the site brought Daniella Helayel’s stunning collection of tropical inspired prints and vividly glamourous colours to life, giving fans of the brand across the globe access to ’The Garden of Eden.’

Issa London is a brand that has also been embraced by the fashion industry, influential trend-setters and celebrity devotees including the Duchess of Cambridge, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lopez.

Missed the show? experience it here  http://www.issalondon.com/issass13

Fashion Folk Turn to Tumblr

Got a brand? Get on Tumblr. That’s the news coming through loud and clear from Folk as Tumblr is supposedly on the cusp of doing something quite incredible. Analysts claim those greedy for web hits should get themselves on the blogging platform sharp as Google searches mentioning the service are poised to surpass those for ‘blog’ by the end of the year, proving that the New York-based company has well and truly established itself as the Web’s next big cheese.

According to The Next Web ( who have reported on this colossal invasion and provided this handy little graph) “Google search numbers are not an exact statistic, but the content of searches does indicate the popularity and interest in services, people and topics online. While it’s true to say that a great many blog readers go straight to sites via Twitter, RSS feeds, emails and other links, Tumblr’s continued rise is massively significant.

If you are a business or individual with a blog that you want to be found online, then running it, or another, on Tumblr is likely to bring you more traffic.

The business world has been largely unsure of how to cater for Tumblr — which is shareable and fast-paced as Twitter but populated with more inspiring text and rich images — and this is likely to be a wake-up call for them.”

Folk – who continue to launch, design and manage the websites and social strategies of numerous luxury brands within the industry – has noticed that the world of fashion developing a major crush on Tumblr over the past few years.

Bloggers, designers and brands are all flocking to the micro-blogging site to showcase their identities in creative, colourful and personal ways.

In turn the industry is a serious business for the site – highlighted by it’s recent appointment of seasoned fashion journalist Valentine Uhovski, who has just been named “Fashion Evangelist” at Tumblr (seriously, that’s his official title).

Of course, some brands are much better at it than others. After claiming four of the eight awards at last year’s Fashion 2.0 Awards, DKNY was once again showing other brands how it should be done by winning the Best Twitter and Best Blog by a Fashion Brand at this years ceremony.

DKNY’s Twitter account and Tumblr blog (dknyprgirl) are entertaining, informative and exceptionally on-brand. The Twitter account features, among other things, live blogs and frequently engages in conversations with followers of all stripes. Meanwhile, the brand’s Tumblr has become a go-to resource for humor-laced PR advice and inspiring imagery.

Brands such as this understand and demonstrate that the goal of social media marketing is to offer content in a variety of ways so a broad audience can pick and choose how they want to consume your content and interact with your brand.

Not everyone likes Tumblr, and not everyone likes Facebook, brand websites, Instagram or Pinterest.

Your goal is to create content targeted to the audiences that frequent each destinations or focus on the site frequented by your target audience in order to achieve maximum brand awareness, word-of-mouth marketing, and prospective business growth.

If you haven’t familiarised yourself – and more importantly your brand – with this new social super power, just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

The Future of Digital Fashion Today

Fashion is finally falling head-over-heels for digital if the latest event from Westfield’s is anything to go by. The London shopping centre launched the first ever all-digital fashion event of its kind this week, with the intention of demonstrating what future shopping will be like and to showcase forward thinking fashion technology.

The Future Fashion event is running until April 1, allowing shoppers to use digital touch screens, QR codes and NFC to browse more than 500 spring 2012 products from retailers including Reiss, Dune, House of Fraser, Vero Moda, Accessorize and Calvin Klein Jeans.

Along with a cinema-style 3D catwalk, social photo-booths allowing shoppers to send their snaps straight to Facebook and Tweetable mirror images to show off their style, customers can also shop till their cards ignite on the stores huge digital shopping screens.

With the event being held at both Westfield London and Westfield Stratford City over the coming weeks, some retailers have already hailed the launch “ahead of its time” and “the perfect example of how bricks and mortar stores can embrace innovative technology”.

The Talks

Folk love when the Internet produces a novel concept that refreshes a tried-and-tested formula – so The Talks is right up our street. The weekly online interview magazine is the creation of Johannes Bonke and Sven Schumann, who’ve had the pleasure of chatting with a collection of cultural characters and infamous personalities from the worlds of fashion, music, art and film.

Rather than fulfilling their duty to attend obligatory interview session to publicise their latest venture, The Talks only features stars who have nothing to promote but instead simply chose to partake in an open, honest and original discussion about their lives.

As purveyors of designer digital, our eyes were drawn to interviews with some of the fashion industries raising stars and established icons – including photographers Bruce Weber and Ryan McGinley, designers  Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Zac Posen and Valentino, and style blogger Scott Schuman.

The articles are full of whit, banter and frank confessions, providing a unique insight into the minds, ambitions and quirks of some of the most powerful players within the industry today.

As well as the exclusive line-up, Folk particularly love how the unpretentious approach to the content is complimented by the minimal design, refined selection of imagery and subtle aesthetic.

Combining all these design elements means this website is a pretty pleasurable and polished product. Gentlemen – we salute you.

London Fashion Week Live

As the fashion world descends on London, and with many of our clients showing at the event, we at Folk have been taking a closer look at the explosion of digital during London Fashion Week. The main feature of next week’s event has to be the record number of shows being streamed live as the British Fashion Council expands its digital schedule.

A total of 44 designer collections will be watched live, with 22 shows being shown at the Courtyard Show Space at Somerset House, 12 from the Embankment Galleries Show Space, eight from Topshop’s venue at 1 Old Billingsgate Walk plus shows from around the city including Burberry Prorsum and Roksanda Ilincic.

It appears the fashion world, and particularly the newly innovative BFC, have realised the potential that digital can offer such an illustrious event. By streaming these shows live online at www.londonfashionweek.co.uk/live brands allow customers and fans a chance to watch and, more crucially, buy from the catwalk without having to visit the capital.

Of course one of the most interactive, accessible and influential marriages between fashion and digital has come about thanks to the domination of Twitter, Tumblr and the notorious style bloggers.

Editors, celebrities, bloggers and designers will all be posting snaps of their favorite pieces as models sashay past them on the runway, meaning any fashion fanatic can buy into the latest trend before the glossies have even hit the newsstands.

To capitalise on this online infatuation, the BFC are also working closely with Twitter during the shows. Question and answer sessions will be held over the six days with guests including designers Anya Hindmarch and Alice Temperley and Dylan Jones, editor of GQ and chair of the Fashion 2012 Menswear Committee.

There’s no doubt that digital will continue to dominate the world of  fashion in 2012, the only question remains who will be best in the online show?