@Stefan
Athleta jumped 41 places in a single month. Nike fell 15. September’s data on 50 global fashion brands shows that in influencer marketing, how well you work with creators now matters far more than how big you already are.
For years, fashion brands have measured social success the easy way: count the followers, celebrate the milestones. September 2026 is a reminder of how little that number tells you.
The latest Fashion Brand Global Social Index from Socially Powerful tracks 50 of the world’s leading fashion brands across Instagram and TikTok. It scores each one out of 100 on four pillars: Brand Presence, Partnership Power, Partnership Effectiveness and Earned Love.
And this month, that leaderboard was turned upside down. Calvin Klein took the top spot with an index score of 90.0, jumping 29 places on the back of the strongest Earned Love score in the top three (39.2). But the real story is what happened underneath it.
The climbers who cracked the creator code
Athleta was September’s biggest mover, rising 41 places to #2 with a score of 82.3. Its secret was not scale: its Partnership Power score was just 4.0. Instead, its Partnership Effectiveness hit 51.8, more than four times any of its other pillars. Fewer creator partnerships, but ones that landed.
It was not alone. Dr. Martens climbed 33 places to #4, Topshop rose 39 to #11, Vero Moda gained 38 to #10 and Arket moved up 31 to #15. Five brands jumped more than 30 places in a single month.
As Socially Powerful founder James Hacking puts it, a 41-place leap “is not a slow climb, it is a brand getting the formula right in real time.”
More creator posts won’t save you. Better ones will.
If volume were the answer, Gymshark would have won. It led the index for always-on activity, publishing around 3,000 collaboration posts in September, ahead of Zara (2,400) and H&M (2,200). Yet it slipped two places to #5.
Arket tells the opposite story. Its influencer partnership engagement rate hit 31.0%, nearly six times second-placed H&M (5.03%). Behind them, every other brand in the top ten sat between 2.27% and 5.03%.
The lesson for brands is blunt: posting more is not a strategy. Choosing the right creators, briefing them well and letting them make content their audiences actually want is.
Instagram stood still. TikTok moved.
On Instagram, most tracked brands grew their following by less than 0.6% in September. Only Vero Moda (+3.8%) and Next (+1.7%) broke clear of the pack. TikTok was a different world, led by Vans (+9.0%) and H&M (+7.5%).
“The brands climbing this index aren’t running one strategy everywhere,” says Socially Powerful CEO Majid Bahi. “They’re showing up differently on each platform, and it’s paying off.”
Marks & Spencer proves the point. It grew 1.4% on Instagram and 5.5% on TikTok, while running one of the highest collaboration volumes in the index. Follower growth, the data suggests, now follows creator activity rather than brand-owned content alone.
Big names, big drops
The flip side of all that momentum was a rough month for some household names. Nike fell 15 places to #20. Hollister dropped 24 to #25. The North Face slid 33 places to #37, Urban Outfitters lost 31 to #49, and Ralph Lauren fell 22 to #33.
Ralph Lauren’s fall is telling. It still produced the month’s most viewed content, a post that pulled in 28.9 million views. One viral moment, it turns out, is no substitute for a consistent creator programme.
Meanwhile, Adidas had the strongest content month of anyone. It claimed both the most engaged brand post (6.8 million engagements, for its Messi and Argentina post) and the most engaged collab post (3.7 million), and climbed nine places to #3.
