Google’s Fashion Week Makeover

Fashion Week is mostly about the clothes, but when it comes to getting an audience around the world’s eyes on the clothes, these days, that is all about the tech.

Tommy Hilfger created an Instapit so Instagrammers could get the best shots of his clothes to send to their followers. Neiman Marcus polled Twitter, and Snapchat continuously created and released daily stories live about the goings-on at New York Fashion Week.

And now, it seems Alphabet wants to play, too.

Google (scion of Alphabet) is tinkering with search carousels that will sit front and center atop Google’s normal search results. What exactly those curated carousels are going to look like is a bit up in the air, but it seems they will be brand-focused and keyed in to what searchers are on the hunt for. Key “Marc Jacobs,” get a Marc Jacobs carousel.

According to Kate Lamphear, a former Maxim editor and “street style pioneer,” the push has already signed 50 brands and is looking to add more. Included so far are Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Christopher Kane, Prada, Burberry and Hermès, among others.

The Fashion Week coverage is somewhat similar to how Google handled the Republican primary debates in January — a search for “Fox News Debate” yielded an entire carousel of content beyond the debate itself for interested viewers.

Google has faced concerns that allowing brands to curate and control the results of their search somewhat flies in the face of what Google is supposed to do — provide the best search results. Google has responded by noting these carousels are only pegged to special events, for an engaged audience looking for them, and that they will not effect the other algorithmic search results on the page.

The question now is whether or not Google — which is not a social network — can play well in a space dominated by photo-sharing networks, like Instagram, which accounted for 97 percent of social media engagement during Feb. 2016’s fashion weeks.

Can Google break in there? Stranger reversals have happened in high fashion.