FASHION-BRANDED ENTERTAINMENT. How Italian Fashion Brands Utilize Audiovisual Media to Tell Stories and Entertain Audiences

During the last decade, the convergence between advertising and the entertainment industry gave birth to new languages that sought to convey brand values in a more effective way. Alongside traditional advertising formats, such as TV commercials and product placement, a new and more refined form of communication has emerged, which is pointed towards storytelling and entertainment: ‘branded entertainment’. Within this context, the fashion industry is a particularly interesting area of study. Having been historically bound to the audiovisual media, fashion was immediately able to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this new language, on the one hand establishing a significant production of audiovisual content (long-short films) with an identifiable form, aesthetic and language; on the other, producing original entertainment content or integrating its values by expressing them in related TV formats. On the basis of the still few academic studies available so far, the primary aim of this article is to shed light on the use of often imprecise terminology related to branded entertainment, through a systemic approach that defines its operating range and highlights the distinctive elements which differentiate branded entertainment from any other hybrid forms of communication. Secondly, the paper will focus on the bond between the fashion and media industries and the production models adopted to date, by categorizing and analysing a corpus of 40 cases of ‘fashion branded entertainment’, carried out by Italian fashion brands from 2010 to 2016.