“It was a nice coincidence,” says a PR representative for Twitter, when we asked if her company had bought and launched Vine just a week or so before New York Fashion Week intentionally. Of course, porn had already made good use of the medium — which allows you to share six-second looping video clips — but it’s fashion potential had yet to be revealed. At the Cut, we’d been playing around, trying to figure out which subjects made for a good Vine, with varying results, and we knew it would factor hugely into the social media experience of Fashion Week. By the end of the cycle, it was clear: Vine had wormed its way into pretty much every feed of every blogger, magazine site, and model.
Getting the short video clips to be enjoyably watchable was another story. If you had third-row seats but were determined to shoot every look, chances are you failed to make good Vines. If you had a basic understanding of jump-cuts or stop-frame animation, your Vines were probably cute and entertaining. When asked to define what made a good Vine, a representative from the company was predictably vague. “There’s really no formula of what makes a Vine ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ It’s really up to the creator to use their imagination with such limited sound bites. It forces people to be concise. When we were picking ‘the best,’ we’re interested in how people tell stories and paint the whole picture using Vine.”*
*This post has been updated with a new headline.
