Sydney Reising Creative

In recent years, the business of fashion PR has been transformed by a series of seismic forces. Digital technology has reshaped the media landscape, giving rise to new communications strategies rooted in the realities of the Internet: open, conversational, immediate and always-on. The growing influence and purchasing power of “millennials,” whose personal values are, in many ways, different to tho

se of previous generations, have begun to shake up the market for luxury goods. And fashion itself has grown from a once closed world into an infinitely more accessible, global phenomenon, hybridising, along the way, with everything from contemporary art to skateboarding. At Hood By Air’s Autumn/Winter 2013 runway outing, fashion-savvy rapper A$AP Rocky closed the show. It was a pivotal moment for the eight-year-old menswear label. Virtually overnight, Hood By Air’s luxury streetwear aesthetic — which blends 1990s-style graphics and striking silhouettes with high-fashion elements borrowed from the playbooks of Raf Simons and Helmut Lang — was featured in a host of mainstream fashion publications. The mastermind behind this fashion moment was upstart fashion PR Sydney Reising, whose career began at age 18. She has worked with brands like Supreme and RVCA to bridge the gap between the worlds of high fashion and street culture. “It’s about taking that client and giving a voice to them that otherwise would not be available to them,” Reising explained. “I have that dialogue with the luxury and top-tier journalists but at the same time can go back and be authentic to my clients and say, ‘I can bro out, you can trust me, I’m an authentic person.’”

“Today, the conversation isn’t just dictated by the traditional sense of PR, [where] we would craft a narrative and just push out that narrative to the media which delivers it to the consumer and there it would be,” she continued. “Now that narrative is developed by the community, so it’s that dialogue that’s fundamental — that’s where your communication strategy has to lie.”

Before launching her own business, among many other roles, Reising worked at Harry Bee’s creative agency The 88 and helped fashion e-commerce start-up The Cools establish a partnership with make-up brand Bobbi Brown. “If Bobbi Brown wants to talk to girls who are Lower East Side, skateboarders’ girlfriends, not the traditional Bobbi Brown pink-wearing girl, how do we start that dialogue and be cool to them?” The answer: give style influencers like Leandra ‘Man Repeller’ Medine skateboarding lessons from a pro skater. These kinds of genre-crossing projects, often involving social media blitzes and parties that tend to get shut down by the police, form the core of what Reising is known for. Now, she and her small team of three are constantly perfecting the art of “the hustle,” as she describes her day-to-day. “I play the role of CEO and intern at the same time. Everyone knows that if I’m doing something I’m creating the guest list, I’m creating the idea, I’m producing the event, I’m seating the show, backstage, I’m everywhere and doing everything. The hustle is just kind of like, not letting anybody get in the way. The hustle is, like, ‘Started from the bottom, now we here, for real.’”