Critical Role, ZHC, Cassey Ho, and Yes Theory will hit the runway at Theorist Media’s “Creators in Fashion” show (Exclusive Interview)

Earlier this month, MatPat revealed Theorist Media‘s fashion-savvy YouTube channel Style Theory is planning a creator catwalk event that’ll air April 25.

Now, Theorist tells Tubefilter the show will feature dozens of looks from spring/summer ’24 collections designed by Critical Role, ZHC, Blogilates and POPFLEX creator Cassey Ho, Yes Theory, and more–with all those creators, plus MatPat and Style Theory creative director/host Amy Roberts, walking the runway.

The four-hour show, called Creators in Fashion, will have an in-person audience of around 150 people and will be broadcast on Style Theory, Game Theory, and across all featured creators’ YouTube channels.

Theorist Media is producing the event with its parent company Lunar X and Paragon Creative Agency, and has been working with YouTube Shopping for several months to make the entire show shoppable and interactive, so every single item on the runway will have a QR code viewers can scan if they’d like to buy it.

“One of the things that’s always been really important to me, just in my personal work on YouTube, has been uplifting the creator economy,” MatPat tells Tubefilter. “I like finding and creating tools that help the digital video business get more respect, help viewers find all the cool things that creators are making, and in general raise the profile of these entertainment production companies of the future. Creators in Fashion is really the latest example of that.”

He says the creator industry as a whole has produced some “incredible products,” with “headliners like Logan Paul and Prime or MrBeast and Feastables, Ryan Trahan and JOYRIDE in the food and beverage space.”

“But there’s so much great work being done in the apparel and fashion space,” he says. “Cristine [Rotenberg] with Holo Taco, beauty influencers with their jewelry. You have just a bunch of apparel lines, like Cassie Ho with POPFLEX, who’s done an amazing job getting her products into Target and really capitalizing on the need there.”

Style Theory “wanted to create an event that served as a place where all those creators could get together and really showcase and serve as a kind of centerpiece for all the great work that’s being done and a place where, hey, if you’ve never heard of these creators, you can see their products,” he says.

Roberts (who’s now Style Theory’s official host, having taken over after MatPat’s recent retirement) adds that while Creators in Fashion will be a runway show focused on showing off clothing, Style Theory is also “involving as many creators as we could and involving as many other types of endeavors that creators are doing […] and so we’ll have people who are lending their business to our event, like nails and jewelry, there to cheer each other on.”

Throughout the event, the Style Theory team will provide in-depth analysis on looks and walks, plus creator interviews, commentary from special guests, behind-the-scenes footage, and a mystery announcement from Theorist Media to close the show.

Theorist says that announcement involves “the future of the ‘fans meet creator fashion’ space.”

Building a foundation for fashion creator recognition

Roberts says Style Theory hopes Creators in Fashion will help people see the importance of fashion-focused content–and the expertise of the creators who make that content.

“Fashion is often seen as very frivolous and just this fun thing to do when really it’s things that affect your everyday life,” she says. “It’s about how you present yourself, how you view yourself. And these people are helping you find it. And what I love about the creators who are participating with us is they all put such value into helping people find these aspects of themselves in their apparel.”

MatPat says if this first iteration of Creators in Fashion goes well, it could serve as proof of concept for making the show an annual event.

“In our belief, we could have actually brought this out to many more creators, because there’s a lot of other people that we were in the process of reaching out to or having early conversations with. We didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew in year one,” he says. “The hope is with this initial proof of concept, we can bring it back in subsequent years and make it into bigger and bigger events to eventually get this to rise to the level of Fashion Week for online creators.”