Transmedia Branding for Digital Fashion Brands A Dialogue between Semiotics and Marketing

This study aims at investigating the profound innovation in the construction of fashion imagery, which has proved to be particularly significant between 2010 and 2023, as soon as the contribution of social media to the dynamics of social communication became substantial. Whilst this trend still exists, in 2023 it is also relevant that some fashion brands are showing a desire to get back to something belonging to the pre-Internet, past fashion language when the protagonist was the product. However, the focus here is on those labels that have been using the Internet to improve their narrative power by sharing new types of fashion stories. In the «post-advertising era» (McKee and Gerace, 2018), featured by the supremacy of the web, brand images generate different tales, revolving around a core of connotative content. This approach is called «Transmedia Branding», a narrative process used by brands to inspire the «tribes» and Online Communities who inhabit their world. Doing so, they also turn their consumers into brands’ storytellers. Transmedia branding, in fact, directly stems from Transmedia Storytelling, which was originally theorized by Jenkins in 2003. After a reflection on transmedia storytelling and, consequently, on transmedia branding, the question that animates this study is the following: what type of innovation has it generated? Moreover, what effects can it produce in fashion imagery?