London Fashion Week 2013: How To Get Involved & Highlights

Hey kittens! It’s Sunday and we’re a couple of days in to London Fashion Week 2013. As y’all know from my holiday series, I’ve been away in Rome on my holiday so unfortunately I’ve not been able to bring you up to date coverage of #LFW. I’ve even had to turn down invites to some shows! However, hopefully in bringing you this featured post on how to get involved with London Fashion Week 2013 I’ll give y’all a breakdown of the week so far, and an expectation of what’s to come…

So, what exactly is London Fashion Week? We’ve all heard of it, but sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what it is, or what it’s for. Well kittens, British fashion is big business, with an estimated £100m worth of orders placed during London Fashion Week alone. London Fashion Week is a trade event and the Designer Showrooms is the platform for over 120 exhibiting designers to sell to buyers and pitch to press. Plus, it’s a pretty snazzy way to get a glimpse at next season’s trends (warning: serious wardrobe envy might occur).

Although I was lucky enough to receive some invites to shows, there are lots of opportunities to get involved with at London Fashion Week without invites or press passes – in fact, anyone is welcome to go down South to soak up the atmosphere. For example, The Courtyard at Somerset House is open to the public – this is where you’ll see all the iconic street style pictures being taken and you could even have the chance at getting snapped yourself! All shows from the Courtyard Show Space are also streamed live to a LED screen outside the catwalk tent, so even without a show ticket you can watch the looks live as they come down the runway from the setting of Somerset House. With 73 designers on the official show schedule, which sees 58 catwalk shows and 15 presentations to take place over 5 days there’s still plenty of opportunity to travel down and watch the stream!

If you fancy popping down this year, there’s also the first on-site pop-up shop which will be open over both London Fashion Week and Vodafone London Fashion Weekend, taking place next weekend on 13th – 22th September. The Shop will be open to the public, selling AW13 ready-to-wear, accessories and shoes by brands including Prism, Zoe Jordan and one of my personal favourite designers, House of Holland. In addition to selling the latest products, a series of pop-up events will take place including flash sales, musical performances, readings, interviews and guest appearances, all of which will be promoted on social media over the course of the week with the hashtag #TheShop. Check it out if you can’t get to visit it yourself.

Speaking of #TheShop hashtag, there’s plenty of other opportunities to get involved with London Fashion Week over social media – y’all can be anywhere in the world for this! An on-site social media wall will bring together the largest crowd-sourced insight into London Fashion Week, featuring Fashion Week images from Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Everyone can get involved by sharing their Fashion Week experiences on social media simply by including the official #LFW hashtag in posts, which will then be displayed on the wall for the duration of the event. Plus, the BFC has partnered with Instagram to share the best looks from the Somerset House Courtyard. The InstaBooth is open to the general public, and the BFC will post highlights to the official London Fashion Week Instagram account and Facebook page using the hashtags #LFW and #InstaBooth.

Finally kitty cats, you can tune into live catwalk shows from the comfort of your own home! For the first time this September, the BFC will live stream multiple catwalk shows directly to its Twitter feed. Christopher Raeburn, Sister by Sibling and Simone Rocha’s catwalk shows will be broadcast to an online audience of over 420,000 followers; the first time multiple shows have ever been live streamed on Twitter. Personally, I’ve been keeping an eye on my favourite designers and the highlight of the footage so far has to be the Mulberry collection, shown today on Day 3. I absolutely adore the iconic Mulberry handbags and so to view the show live this afternoon was a dream!

To summarise, you can tune in to view the live stream for the rest of the shows here and find out more info on getting involved here. So kittens, what’s been your favourite collection shown so far? Have you been tuning in to watch the shows? Leave me a comment below and let me know! And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, like my Facebook page and subscribe to my Youtube channel to keep up to date with all things fashion!