After a nine-month gestation while he took a break from streaming, Kai Cenat’s brainchild Vivet was born. It entered the fashion world with a baptism of fire: the luxury streetwear brand from Twitch’s most popular vlogger debuted at New York Fashion Week, featuring Alton Mason on the runway and Lauryn Hill sitting front row.
Watched by over 180,000 people worldwide via live stream, clips of the show later went viral across Instagram and TikTok, showcasing fellow streamer Marlon walking for Vivet, scroll-throughs of the see-now-buy-now techwear, and straight-to-camera reaction vids.
This barrage of fired-out clips, a form of user-generated content that is shared far and wide across social media platforms, is one of the hottest new ways to reach audiences online. It’s called clipping, and it’s all about volume — recent data from shortform social media platform Kick showed that in a single month alone earlier this year, 1,737 clippers generated 309,000 videos.
It’s a fitting marketing tactic and a full-circle moment for Cenat; he was one of the early Twitch streamers who carved out a following with this approach, encouraging viewers to trawl through recordings of his videos, repost clips of them, and then get paid based on views. “Kai Cenat basically built his entire audience on clipping, so watching that show get distributed into thousands of different videos within hours was almost inevitable,” says Nicolai Amirzadeh, COO of Clip, a clipping agency that offers brands a one-stop-shop to edit down and send out content.
Unlike most clipping networks — which allow anyone to join as a gig worker (or “clipper”), chop up a campaign, post on their own socials, and get paid on an internal platform based on views — Clip has a curated team. “Every clipper gets vetted before they get access to anything because we care way more about the quality of the people in the network than having the biggest possible clipper count,” Amirzadeh explains.
“For brands, we have tried to make it as close to one step as possible. You request a campaign, upload your content, tell us who you want to reach, and we take care of pretty much everything else.”
It’s a head-spinningly fast-moving industry. According to Clipping Culture’s data, the monthly number of brands funding campaigns rose 35% in Q3 compared to the first half of the year.
Since moving from streaming into wider entertainment over the last couple of years, movie studios and record labels have used it to amplify campaigns. “Clipping has gone from a gaming and music tactic to a mainstream distribution channel over the last couple of months,” Amirzadeh explains.
“Most large gaming publishers and record labels now run clipping campaigns as a standard part of their content strategy,” says Evan Stanfield, founder of Clipping Culture. The agency says it boasts 500,000 clippers reaching, through the combined audiences of their social media pages, over a billion pairs of eyeballs.
They run a CPM model, charging brands per one-thousand views. “Brands are realizing that a single piece of content, a runway moment, a campaign shoot, a behind-the-scenes clip, can generate dozens of unique takes when it’s put in front of a network of creators instead of just being posted once from a brand account.”
Fashion is gradually entering the clipping conversation. “Fashion has been slower to adopt it, but we're starting to see real interest,” says Stanfield.
“Luxury has been a bit slower, which makes sense for an industry that has always been very focused on control and scarcity.” Brooke McCord, a creative director, consultant and editor specialising in digital communities, agrees: “Clipping is still very much an entertainment industry habit, not a fashion one — and by a mile. It moved from live streaming to music because both run on a constant stream of disposable, chopped-up content moments, and luxury fashion doesn’t produce content in this style.”
But there’s space for it to happen. Amirzadeh notes that Willy Chavarria’s casting of vlogger Marlon for his SS26 show didn’t just amplify the vlogger-fashion crossover, but also introduced clipping. “He streamed the whole thing and had clippers posting it everywhere, which brought a completely new set of eyeballs to the fashion show.” Is it time for high fashion to splice, dice, and share?
Going long, going short
Short-form has been pronounced dead several times over, replaced by long-form. But short-form is still an intrinsic part of fashion’s marketing mix, exemplified by the likes of Mugler’s Instagram series with David Hoyle or Jacquemus’s surrealist videos.
For clippers, this snappy content is what packs a punch. “Short-form is still the dominant way people consume media, and I do not see that changing anytime soon.
I think one of the clearest signs of that is that even the largest technology companies in the world are now using clipping to distribute their own keynotes,” says Amirzadeh. “Short-form isn’t going anywhere; it's still where the volume and the discovery happens,” echoes Stanfield.
Both agencies, though, believe that short-form is a gateway to long-form, not a barrier. “I don’t think it’s short-form versus long-form so much as short-form feeding long-form.
A punchy 15-second clip often gets someone to seek out the full video,” says Stanfield. “I do not think it necessarily means people stopped liking long-form content, though.
People just want control. Give me the part I care about, let me skip everything else, and let me consume it at my own tempo.
Long-form did not lose. It just stopped being the unit of consumption,” agrees Amirzadeh.
“We, as creators, need to decide which format suits which context best. I stay away from the ‘short-form content is bad’ narrative,” says fashion critic and Instagram personality Ryan Yip.
Vitally, keeping things unpolished and rough-around-the-edges can pay dividends. “The other big shift we are seeing is the actual style of the content.
People are getting tired of the MrBeastification of everything,” says Amirzadeh. “The crazy edits, subtitles, sound effects every two seconds, etc.
Raw and relatively unpolished video is starting to outperform a lot of the hyper-edited stuff.” Of course, fashion is hardly MrBeast territory: but an off-the-cuff GRWM, say, may fare better than a slick, buttoned-up commercial.
Clippers for hire
The glossy campaign is still the ultimate vanity project for fashion houses. It’s why the likes of Gucci, Prada and Chanel have recently released high-budget short films. “Many brands feel like they’re already pivoting toward this. Episodic, serialized content and microdramas are everywhere right now,” says McCord, citing examples like Marc Jacobs’s The Scene, Ferragamo’s seven-chapter La Prima Impressione and Away’s eight-episode Actually Away.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s what’s cutting through. “Spending a ton of money on a beautiful campaign film does not automatically mean that it is going to be the thing people actually share or watch,” says Amirzadeh.
There’s an opportunity for brands to hire a clipper agency, or assemble their own coterie of clippers, to cut up runway shows and presentations, A-B-Z test captions and cross-pollinate a diverse range of followers. “Instead of one polished brand post, you get hundreds or thousands of clippers putting their own spin on the content, each reaching a different audience segment,” says Stanfield.
“That diversity of voice tends to build more trust than a single branded post, and trust is what drives conversion. We’ve seen this play out clearly in gaming and music, and the underlying psychology should hold for fashion too,” he continues.
It’s a Gestalt shift in who’s sitting in the director’s chair. “The brand does not necessarily make the footage that defines the moment anymore.
The brand makes the moment, and everyone else makes the footage,” says Amirzadeh.
Adding paid spend can further turbocharge this effect. “What we see work really well is running paid media at the same time as the clipping campaign instead of doing one after the other.
That way the same person might see you multiple times across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, but you are getting a lot of those touchpoints extremely cheaply through clipping,” says Amirzadeh. Cheaply being the key word: “We deliver verified views at roughly $1-4 per thousand, compared to $10-25+ for paid social,” he says.
The other way is putting paid spend behind organic-tested clips, or, as Amirzadeh says, “you can run the ad directly from the clipper's own handle using TikTok Spark codes, which we surface to brands inside our platform.”
It’s vital, though, to premeditate this and consider portion sizes before cooking up a batch of fresh content. Where podcasts need soundbites, campaigns need videobites.
“Brands that shoot with clipping in mind, thinking about which moments will stand alone as a 10 to 30-second clip, get dramatically more value out of the same production budget,” says Stanfield. “This is probably the highest-leverage change a brand can make right now.
Internally, we call it content engineering,” says Amirzadeh. “Clips used to just be a byproduct of long-form content.
You would make the long-form piece and then figure out what you could cut from it afterward. Now you should almost be doing the opposite.”
Whether that leads people to seek out the more fruitful source material needs testing. “I think runway video clipping lacks that; it doesn’t entice me to want to see the whole collection outside of a ‘hmm that’s cool’ and scroll past,” says Yip.
“This may be the obstacle to clipping being properly utilized in fashion. It isn’t a clipping problem; it is a funnel problem.
The clips lack proper attraction and incentive for viewers to want to interact with the primary text.”
Toeing the line between quality and quantity is also about finding a delicate balance. The clippers prioritize scale.
“Having fewer clips does not really give you more control. It just gives you a smaller sample size,” says Amirzadeh.
“Volume is the name of the game now.” This is a risk for luxury brands that rely on bulletproof brand safety and avoid becoming overexposed. Both clipping agencies emphasize the rules in place to protect brand values.
“We give creators clear brand and content guidelines before a campaign starts, and every piece of content goes through moderation before it counts toward payout,” Stanfield says, noting that only positive sentiment can be expressed. Soon, they will be able to pre-approve posts before they go live on social media.
There’s space to take risks and tap into a desire for more offbeat content. “If Michael Rider has someone follow him 24/7 in the Celine atelier and head office, recording him doing everything, joking with staff, the frustration he goes through, all the unpolished bits, will people actually think Celine is cheap now?
I don’t think so,” Yip says. “I think fashion does suffer from an “everything needs to be polished” problem, when in fact, introducing something like that and clipping all these very human and unpolished moments can actually help the brand create a different side.”
“The real opportunity for luxury isn’t caution, it’s daring. We all know that the 30-second hero film and stills campaign format is dated, and that it’s not how people actually absorb content anymore,” says McCord.
In terms of maintaining a sense of exclusivity, Amirzadeh believes ensuring the product isn’t easily attainable and still aspirational is enough. “The control comes from having tight rules and good measurement around what gets distributed. I would keep the scarcity in the product and in the moment, not in the distribution.”
Seen this way, fashion brands can consider dialing up the video clips, as long as they don’t price-down their apparel. Whether luxury labels will take after Cenat and embrace clipping culture remains to be seen. But if they do, it should involve stitching things together in a more considered way, using pre-approvals and vetted creators to strike a sweet spot between campaign CPM and brand DNA. Don’t call it clipping: call it cutting-and-sewing.