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As fashion brands continue to pour resources into developing large, engaged fanbases on Facebook, many are now experimenting with methods for converting those fans into customers directly through the social network.

The most recent of these comes from the house of Oscar de la Renta, which began selling a cocktail-sized, flower-shaped perfume ring exclusively on its Facebook Page Wednesday. The $65 ring encases a solid concentration of a fragrance Oscar de la Renta’s fans are already familiar with through a Facebook sampling campaign the company conducted last spring.

In an interview with Mashable in September, Oscar de la Renta CEO Alex Bolen said he expects Facebook “will become a major channel of commerce” for many brands. “Whether [Facebook] becomes one of ours depends on us developing products that are right for our brand and that channel of our commerce,” he added.

Although $65 is at the very low end for a product bearing the Oscar de la Renta name, Bolen still expressed “some reservations” about whether a $65 item would sell well on Facebook.

Oscar de la Renta isn’t the first fashion or luxury brand to experiment with F-commerce in this way. Earlier this year, Diane von Furstenberg began offering a different $345 wrap-style exclusively through Facebook every month. Elsewhere, brands and retailers have created shopping tabs on their respective Facebook Pages, allowing users to browse and complete purchases without leaving the social network, while others have created apps that allow fans to customize products they can then purchase on Facebook or their websites.

Although these efforts have generated a fair amount of PR buzz, most of these companies are losing money on these efforts, says Maureen Mullen, director of research and advisory services at luxury research and consulting firm L2. As the cost of developing these initiatives comes down and Facebook’s marketing vehicles become more effective, she believes this trend will reverse, however. Perhaps Oscar de la Renta will be the first to reverse it.

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Thanks largely to improvements in mobile technology as well as the influx of photo-hungry fashion bloggers, more fashion show attendees than ever are snapping and uploading runway shots in real time to the web.

This Tuesday, American fashion designer Oscar de la Renta will leverage this trend to create a new kind of online presentation of his Spring 2012 collection at odlrlive.tumblr.com.

The page will display all photos uploaded to Tumblr with the tag #odlrlive in real-time, generating live show coverage from editors, bloggers, models and viewers at home. At 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday (9/13), a livestream of the show will play in the middle of the page as photos continue to populate the background.

It’s an inventive initiative that sets Oscar de la Renta’s online show apart from every other livestream this season, bringing together all of the scattered coverage the show is sure to merit across Tumblr, and involving both the brand’s offline and online audience in the creation of what is designed to be a unique, kaleidoscopic record of the event.

There is a risk, of course, that the page will be littered with spam. When previewing the page shortly after it went live on Friday, three of the five pictures were of stuffed or felt animals (since removed). Rest assured that Tumblr’s internal team will be monitoring the page closely.

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At 1 p.m. ET Monday, June 7, American fashion designer Oscar de la Renta will unveil his Resort 2011 collection before a select coterie of fashion critics, buyers, celebrities and other industry professionals on a runway in New York — as well as thousands of fans watching the show live on Livestream and Facebook.

A number of fashion blogs will also be hosting the Livestream, and users can use the platform’s chat features to discuss the collection with other viewers on FacebookFacebook and Twitter during the show. A few minutes before the show starts, the designer will address the online audience about the collection and the company’s social media efforts.

The event is part of a broader shift in the attitude of the fashion industry, which has been frequently criticized for its hyper-exclusivity and the slow rate at which it has embraced certain technologies, like sustainable manufacturing and online platforms.

It wasn’t until this February that a small number of fashion houses, including Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabanna, began streaming their runway shows for the first time on their websites and mobile applications, and even then only a few of those shared their videos on Facebook and Livestream as well. Now, fashion enthusiasts can see entire collections at the same time as the buyers and press, and begin sharing their opinions about each look as it comes down the runway.

“The audience of [our] shows has evolved over the last 50 years,” explained Alex Bolen, the CEO of Oscar de la Renta. “Previously it was the buyers who were sitting in the first and foremost seats and while they are an extremely important constituency for our show, there’s a broader constituency we want to know about our brand.”

Oscar de la Renta has ramped up its social media efforts as of late, leveraging Facebook to share behind-the-scenes footage with its more than 30,000 fans and to drive sales at its online store. The brand is also very engaged with followers on Twitter via the whimsical and personable @OscarPRGirl.

“We’re a family-owned, relatively small business competing against big players,” Bolen said. “We have to constantly be looking for ways to get an edge, to punch above our weight. It’s my belief that some people are moving slowly in the e-commerce space. We embrace the fact that things are rapidly changing, understand the fact that we’ll have some missteps, but we want to be in the game and figure out which direction things are moving.”

Although Oscar de la Renta has been relatively quick to appropriate social media resources, there are several reasons why the industry as a whole has been hesitant to do so. For one thing, the fashion industry has always thrived on the aura of exclusivity it creates around the unveiling of its collections; invitations for major fashion shows are generally reserved for celebrities and the industry elite.

Now, thanks to the livestream, anyone with an InternetInternet connection can watch the runway show live. As Natalie Massenet, founder and chairman of Net-a-porter.com explained, “Buyers and the press have been privileged and blessed to be in this little club, but now the consumer is in the room with us, and everything has changed.”

Timing is a larger issue. Collections are generally unveiled six months before they are purchased and worn by consumers; fall clothes are shown in February, just before spring weather arrives, and spring previews occur in September, just as consumers are stocking up on chunky knits and leggings for the cooler months. The clothes that Oscar de la Renta shows today will not appear in stores until the holiday season.

“What’s the point of showing these clothes so early on… when you’re promoting a product that’s not even available to buy?” Lazaro Hernandez, the co-founder of fashion label Proenza Schouler, asked in an interview with Portfolio.

Bolen acknowledged the general fear that the event will be “overexposed and the clothes will be tired in six months.” The only solution, he said, was to get the clothes into stores more quickly, although production, especially work by hand, takes a certain amount of time. “But there’s no stopping it,” he said. “The information is going to be out there. It’s not as if we’re going to be able to prevent people from looking at our clothes…We [just need] to get quicker.”

What do you think of Oscar de la Renta’s decision to stream the show live online? Should the fashion industry continue to embrace social media, or is there a risk that certain brands may lose their luster? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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