L.A. Fashion Week Calendar Girl
Though our staff has been keeping track of the sprouting events for L.A. Fashion Week here on the blog and on the California Apparel News calendar, we also confer with Jen Uner’s www.FashionWeekLA.com. She has been compiling the L.A. Fashion Week calendar for eight years.
I ran into Uner at the Gen Art event last night, and she shared some interesting statistics about who has their eyes on Los Angeles’ fashion community. Last season the site added a registration option, where qualified journalists and industry professionals could receive PR contact information for events and be recommended to event organizers for invitations. Of the approximately 1,300 registrants this season, about 250 were recommended to event producers for the press list and about 750 for the “fashion list,” which includes fashion-industry professionals and fashion fans.
Today, FashionWeekLA has more than 4,000 Twitter followers that include major publications, fashion fans and bloggers, hotels, museums such as LACMA, and stores such as Nordstrom, Barney’s Co-Op and The Grove.
Uner aims for FashionWeekLA to be like a centralized concierge service for fashion event producers and industry professionals. It's the top hit in a Google search for “L.A. Fashion Week,” meaning her inbox gets lots of inquiries from traveling press looking for advice.
"I had this writer coming from France, and she’s coming to cover what’s happening in L.A. She doesn’t know where to stay, where to eat, where to shop. Just to give her a little bit of guidance, just to be someone on the phone who can help her get where she needs to go, I think if we could expand on that model, it’d be great."
Uner continued: "Everybody has their own invitation list. We’re not saying we want to get in the way of the designers and who they want to invite to their shows ... we just want to help those that are showing understand who’s interested in coming and for those who come, to be able to help them understand the total landscape of what’s available in L.A.” Uner also works with Cate Mowell's TheContactListonline.com fashion and beauty database to help determine qualified registration applicants.
As events are still being added to the calendar days and hours before the doors open, Uner said she is not actively promoting FashionWeekL.A. on a bigger stage than the local community. But she said L.A. will get there, eventually.
“There’s a lot of really fresh energy and enthusiasm with the people who are producing fashion-week events right now. I do think that it helps drive interest, excitement, awareness, communication and attendance when you’ve got a really strong central hub with really exceptional talent [in the way that the major Fashion Weeks internationally are organized]. That dynamic doesn’t change. We look forward to seeing that happen in the future. In the meantime, we’re going to revel in our indie energy.”
