TikTok teams up with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent to livestream runway shows from fashion weeks around the globe

• TikTok just announced TikTok Fashion Month, a new initiative in which the popular social media platform will livestream runway shows and fashion week events from around the world featuring a variety of luxury designers.
• TikTok said it will livestream two fashion shows a week from brands such as Louis Vuitton, Alice + Olivia, Saint Laurent, and JW Anderson, among others.
• "We've seen the fashion industry reinvent what luxury fashion means to culture and society through TikTok by bringing fashion into the homes of our community during quarantine," said CeCe Vu, TikTok's fashion content partnerships lead.

TikTok users will soon start to see real-time luxury fashion content hit their feeds in connection with the debut of the social media app's TikTok Fashion Month.

TikTok announced on Thursday that it's partnering with several designer brands including Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent, and Alice + Olivia to livestream shows and events during New York Fashion Week and beyond. The initiative will feature a variety of hashtags, live videos, and new creative effects that TikTok users can begin using today through October 8.

According to TikTok, the effort is designed to help better connect designers to consumers during the pandemic, as the coronavirus outbreak continues to roil the nation and leave Americans cooped up at home. Though Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in August that New York Fashion Week would be permitted to continue as planned, it was with the caveat that spectators be prohibited, among other limitations. "With the majority of people still quarantined at home and limiting their social engagements, brands have had to quickly pivot to discover new ways to connect with their customers while also bringing creative streetwear and runway to fans," TikTok said in the announcement on Thursday. "That's where TikTok comes in."

CeCe Vu, TikTok's fashion content partnerships lead, said the month-long event will help designers increase visibility of new collections while allowing them to reach new demographics. TikTok currently has a captive audience of more than 100 million monthly viewers, many of them hailing from the Gen Z cohort — a sector luxury fashion has historically struggled to break into.

"We've seen the fashion industry reinvent what luxury fashion means to culture and society through TikTok by bringing fashion into the homes of our community during quarantine," Vu said in a statement. She added that the month-long event "is just another way for our brand partners to leverage the platform's authentic and community-driven approach to showcase their art, creativity, and personalities in a unique and truly TikTok way."

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Jonathan Anderson, founder and creative director at JW Anderson, said that revealing the brand's upcoming collection on a platform like TikTok has been a long time coming for the company.

"It's always been important for JW Anderson to work with new technologies and platforms. I think TikTok is challenging norms and innovating the way JW Anderson does," Anderson said in a statement. The debut of TikTok Fashion Month comes after a bevy of luxury designers joined TikTok in recent months, including Louis Vuitton — a brand that officially joined the platform at the start of September and is prominently featured on TikTok Fashion Month's calendar.

The debut of TikTok Fashion Month, arriving in tandem with the rise of luxury retailers on the app, also echoes hypotheses made to Business Insider earlier this month regarding the platform's forthcoming role in luxury fashion marketing.

"During the pandemic, and with fashion weeks currently a thing of the past, luxury brands must shift their perspectives on how to engage audiences, and deliver content that is not a replication of fashion weeks, but a reimagination of it that works on new channels like TikTok," Thomas Rankin, cofounder and CEO of the visual marketing platform Dash Hudson told Business Insider.