Does Fashion Have an Over-Gifting Problem?

Flooding the feed with the "It" bag du jour is a tired strategy, and can turn discerning shoppers off.

The holidays have come and gone, but as we settle into the new year, you’ve surely noticed that many of your favorite social media personalities cleaned up when it came to seasonal gifts — particularly those from luxury brands. It’s no coincidence that dozens of influencers wind up with the same presents beautifully wrapped under their trees, as fashion houses have employed a mass gifting strategy to get their newest, trendiest products on as many eyeballs as possible for years. To the well-trained eye, there’s nothing more boring than a seeding blitz, yet it remains the marketing blueprint.

I wrote about this phenomenon for the first time almost seven years ago as editor-in-chief of Fashionista, when Dior rereleased its Y2K icon, the Saddle Bag. It was a hot item from the moment it made its debut on Dior’s Spring/Summer 2000 runway, when John Galliano was creative director. Aside from famously appearing on the arm of Carrie Bradshaw in a Season 3 episode of Sex and the City, it was beloved by highly photographed celebrities — the aughts equivalent of influencers, with paparazzi shots as their fit pics — like Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, and Mischa Barton.

In 2018, a huge push surrounding the bag’s reissue meant that it was gifted to dozens of influencers at the same time, resulting in a complete flood of the Instagram feed when they posted their photos in unison. Those were the days before the algorithm was shot, and Instagram still showed you chronological content from the people you follow. That day, Dior received millions of impressions on Instagram, though not in a manner you’d consider organic. I can’t confirm whether the influencers were paid in addition to receiving a Saddle Bag (currently retailing for $4,400), though I suspect they were, but this sort of rollout has proven to move the needle in terms of sales and build brand awareness. You’re nothing if you’re not talked about, after all!

This also meant that fashion enthusiasts on Instagram were served the Saddle Bag ad nauseum, to the point where it became tiresome in a matter of days — if not hours. At the time, I spoke to

Taylor Lorenz

about the spectacle. She told me: “What they’ve done is completely saturated the market and the bag is going to have a shorter shelf life because of it. You don't want to see the same thing on your feed every two seconds; that’s why people are constantly moving on from one thing to the next. If you send [an item] to that many influencers — many with overlapping fan bases — it’s going to be too much. I personally think that will backfire.”

Some LV gifts posted on IG Stories

A few days ahead of the new year, it was déjà vu — this time, for the reissue of Louis Vuitton’s famed Y2K collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, which debuted when Marc Jacobs was the house’s creative director. To celebrate the partnership’s 20th anniversary, LV spammed our feeds with limited-edition, multicolored logo bags in a variety of shapes, courtesy of the popular content creators (many of whom are friends with each other) who received one for the holidays and subsequently posted on Instagram. I personally saw five IG Stories featuring the bags in the same day, which just so happened to be the day the official press release from the French house hit my inbox.