Mapping Brazil - Fashion: Fashion as Entertainment

In Brazil, fashion is a form of personal expression and style that also creates a sense of belonging to certain groups. Additionally, fashion holds a share in the ‘portfolio of Brazilian interests’, as entertainment. In fact, brands and businesses will try to reach out to such interests, transforming commercial initiatives into branded content and creating exhibitions and red carpet opportunities in social gatherings or co-sponsoring parties targeted at fashionistas.

Today, fashion as entertainment in Brazil is still more of an offline matter when it comes to high design and high fashion, with luxury brands promoting exhibitions and parties and Vogue bringing its global retail promotion campaign, Fashion Night Out, to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as well as calling the shots at the fashionistas’ favourite Carnival programme, the Vogue Gala Carnival Ball in São Paulo.

Apart from internet-related fashion news or YouTube channels, fashion content as home entertainment does exist, but it is still a segment to be developed and explored. In a country where reality shows have become so popular, Brazilian versions of such programmes as Next Top Model and Project Runway last only a couple seasons, with their original versions prevailing on the pay-TV programme grid. Open TV enjoys more popularity with ‘how to’ formats that change the look of a guest picked from the audience at auditorium shows and teaching style, such as the national version of What Not to Wear shown on SBT (the second-largest Brazilian network) that is hosted by Brazilian top model Isabela Fiorentino and stylist Arlindo Grund.

Fashion associated with celebrities can be a successful formula, especially when it comes wrapped up with catchy storytelling as part of the national soap opera phenomenon and also through Brazilians’ love affair with TV series such as Sex and the City that have a clear fashion background.

When the Brazilian uber model Gisele Bundchen announced her retirement from the runway, choosing São Paulo Fashion Week SS15/16 for her last catwalk, it was mentioned in every relevant media headline in the country and widely discussed across TV channels and shows. On Gisele’s goodbye ‘D-Day’, live transmission of the Colcci show by GNT Fashion (a pay-TV fashion-focused programme of GNT, a Globo network channel) was for over 30 minutes one of the ten most watched and equally most Twitter-commented TV shows in Brazil. Apart from that, all of the other nine shows ranking in the top ten related to the National Soccer Cup, the Latin America Soccer Cup and the Champion’s League. When showing any other type of content than sports, hardly any pay-TV channel in Brazil gets such a high ranking.

The influence of TV is not likely to be dissociated from Brazilians’ information and references on style, mostly because of the amount of time that they spend watching TV. Even when compared with the rise of the internet among younger generations, most of the content watched online is in video format. A study released by IBOPE (a public opinion research institute that measures TV audience numbers) showed that Brazilians watched TV almost six hours daily in 2014, which represents three months out of the year dedicated to that activity. The amount of TV time per individual has increased 40 minutes in the past seven years, with the rise of TV watching being led by pay-TV. The pay-TV audience in Brazil already represents 50% of Globo network penetration, which in 2014 reached 4.263 million people per minute, according to IBOPE. Notwithstanding, in the same year, open TV registered growth after losing audience numbers for years in a row. Symptomatically, all open TV channels have clearly invested in the image of their anchors, bringing fashion awareness beyond fictional characters.

When considering this background, it is possible to project some opportunity for more fashion-related content to arise, especially through new national content programming on Brazilian pay-TV. In September 2011, the Brazilian president Dilma Roussef approved Law 12.485, aimed at stimulating Brazilian cultural audio-visual production on pay-TV, which consequently creates a market share for content producers. That being said, it is true that fashion-related topics such as style, beauty and top modelling are all interesting topics for Brazilian audiences and content producers will be paying closer attention to filming opportunities in this field.

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