Introduction
Fashion week is not won on the runway anymore. It is won on Instagram, in the hours after a show, measured in earned media value rather than applause. And when you read the social data from the biggest shows, one story keeps repeating: the brands that cast the right faces beat the brands with the best clothes. The numbers are blunt about it.
The metric that matters
The scoreboard is earned media value (EMV), an estimate of what a brand's organic social coverage is worth. Analytics firms like Lefty plus Kolsquare track it across the big four fashion weeks, New York, London, Milan plus Paris, alongside engagement plus share of voice.
One platform dominates the count. Reported data has shown Instagram engagement on fashion week content vastly outweighing TikTok, because Instagram's visual formats, carousels, Stories plus Reels, suit runway plus front-row moments. So while TikTok matters for the broader conversation, EMV on Instagram is effectively how fashion week keeps score. Treat any figure here as a reported estimate, since EMV is modelled, not exact.
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What the data shows
The headline numbers point one way. According to Lefty figures for the SS25 womenswear season, Dior topped Paris with around 61.9 million dollars in EMV plus Prada led Milan with about 47.9 million, while Burberry dominated London, reportedly generating a sum via Instagram alone worth many times the fashion week's own presence. New York's season ran into the hundreds of millions overall, with Tommy Hilfiger out front.
Dig into who drove those numbers plus a pattern jumps out: strategic casting, especially of K-pop plus Asian celebrities. Reported data has credited figures like BTS's Jin with a large share of a single brand's EMV plus Blackpink's Jennie with some of the highest individual EMV at couture. Another quiet trend: fewer influencers posting but higher engagement, as brands lean on quality of casting over sheer volume.
The lesson for brands
The takeaway reaches well beyond fashion. The shows that win online are the ones that put the right high-profile faces in the right places, turning a few appearances into enormous organic coverage. The clothes get the headlines but the casting gets the EMV.
For any brand, the principle holds: choosing creators plus faces whose audience genuinely matches your target is what turns a moment into measurable social value. The fashion houses topping these rankings are not simply spending more, they are casting smarter, matching globally resonant creators to the audiences they want to reach. That is a discipline any brand can borrow, even without a runway.
Where Flinque fits
An honest boundary first. The EMV tracking behind these fashion week reports is the work of social-intelligence firms like Lefty plus Kolsquare, not Flinque. Flinque does not measure EMV or run social listening, so for that specific analysis you would use those tools.
What Flinque does is the step the whole story turns on: finding plus vetting the right creators to cast in the first place. Since the winning brands win on casting, plus casting is a discovery plus vetting problem, Flinque helps you find creators whose audience matches your target across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X, with fake-follower detection on every profile, from 49 dollars a month. So read the EMV reports for the scoreboard, plus use Flinque to find the faces that could put you on it. You can try it free with no credit card.