10 ottobre 2016

LM 65SCIENCES OF FASHION / SOCIOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL NETWORKS

I text: Rossi G., Fashion and Identity: the concealment or disclosure process?

presented at the XI. ECSBS in Rome – September 1-4, 2016.

II text: Rossi G., “Broadcasting fashion on the Web: Magazines, blogs and so-

cial networks” article written for the European Journal of Research on Social

Studies, August 2014.

• What has changed from 2014 to today?

• How they have evolved relationships and professions on the network?

• How they have changed the rules of the online communications?

• What communication scenarios are now open for the future?

• How can we prepare for them? How can we study them?

• How can we study and interpret networks today?

These are only some of the questions you have to ask to yourselves and to us

during this course to create a state of mind/thinking useful to work in the

fashion system today, especially in the communication part. On the other

hand we must emphasize that many of the dynamics that highlight for fashion

apply to many other sectors and can be applied elsewhere. Fashion

communication online is a niche of fashion communication that is a niche itself

of communication in general. The best way to study the dynamics of commu-

nication nowadays is immerse ourselves in it, armed with a proper toolbox.

For this reason during this course we will work alongside theory and prac-tice, exercises and field analysis to more analytical parts. It’s essential for the

success of the course, for you, to get the full benefit, to put you actively to-

wards this teaching and not in a passive way, as if the teacher were to just

here tell truths and you record them and repeat them for the final exam.

In this course I would like to have a very interactive method, inspired by the

design thinking approach. Design thinking is a formal method for practical,

creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an

improved future result. In this regard it is a form of solution-based, or solution-

focused thinking – starting with a goal (a better future situation) instead of

solving a specific problem. By considering both present and future conditions

and parameters of the problem, alternative solutions may be explored simulta-

neously.

This approach differs from the analytical scientific method, which begins by

thoroughly defining all parameters of a problem to create a solution. Design

thinking identifies and investigates with known and ambiguous aspects of the

current situation to discover hidden parameters and open alternative paths

that may lead to the goal. Because design thinking is iterative, intermediate

"solutions" are also potential starting points of alternative paths, including re-defining of the initial problem.

In 2015 I published a book called “Fashion blogger, new dandy?” by

comparison with journalists and fashion bloggers. Why? Because in the early

years of fashion blogging or blogging in general- as researchers of

communication, but also as professionals - what we wondered were the differ-

ences between journalists and bloggers. In my essay I fixed some points: 1)

blogging can be a profession; 2) a profession that only sometimes it’s similar

to journalism; 3) always more often a blogger is a testimonial not a witness of

contemporary times; 4) the phenomenon of fashion blogger, in this sense,

considering them as influencers, is not new, think about the dandies in the

XIX century, and in particular of the the most famous one, Oscar Wilde. So,

coming back to our “ridefining the initial problem” i mean exactly this: you

have to start from a problem, analyze it, but don’t become fixated on it, you

have to be always open minded and accept new solutions, especially in a so

liquid society like the one in which we live.

We begin already in this first lesson by applying this method. The course is

about networks and we must create our own ones that in the future can be

useful to our career. Don’t be lazy, try always to go in depth with your

colleagues, professors, guests of the course, ask always many questions,

read as much as you can. This is also helpful for the part of the course de-

voted to storytelling, also for the creative part of the work, you need

information, you need to feed your imagination. We can speak about digital

networks or physical ones, about people or about locations. Everyday we

must add something, we must enrich our list of contacts. And we must do this

in the properly way, starting from the must have, the must known ones.

For this reason I would like to began each lesson with 15 minutes of press reviews in which students show/read to the class an article and comment it,

underlining names and networks useful to connect with, for examples

exploring the social networks sites related. Few words about inspiration. You

can find it everywhere, in this sense it would be useful to enlarge this morning

press review as a moment of sharing contents/contacts that would be useful

for the growing of the full group. Exihibitions, tv-series, movies, upcoming

designers, everything that you find interesting.

I will give you an example to understand better what I’m speaking about. If

you want to work as trendsetter in the fashion universe, you must know some

topic place, as Colette in Paris, a sort of pilgrimage place during Paris

Fashion Week, that this year celebrates 20 years in business. In this article,

on the daily web magazine BOF Business of Fashion (https://www.busines-

soffashion.com/articles/intelligence/20-year-anniversary-colette-sarah-andel-

man?utm_source=Subscribers&utm_campaign=253b0a0f14-

&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d2191372b3-253b0a0f14-418308929) the

founder (with her mother Colette) Sarah Andelman talks about the genesis

and the growth of Colette maybe the most iconic concept store in the world.

Karl Lagerfeld said about them: “It’s the only shop where I go because they

have things no one else has. I buy watches, telephones, jewellery there —

everything really! They have invented a formula that you can’t copy eas-ily, because there is only one Colette and her and Sarah are 200 percent in-

volved.”

How they have achieved this?

Tenacity, passion, professionalism, constant research, creativity, talent…

“I feel lucky to have the freedom to evolve permanently from season to sea-

son, because even if I know many designers, some of them friends, at a cer -

tain point they can become locked in a certain style and I think that fashion is about a perpetual change and I say ‘bravo’ to the designers who are able to reinvent themselves time after time”

(Sarah Adelman)

The rise of online shopping and social media have been kind to Colette. The

store generates 20 percent of its steadily-rising revenue online, significantly

more than the industry average. Colette has also amassed over 822,000 followers Instagram where the store messages its continuous product drops.

Study this network, take inspirations from it. You have to start from something,

and learning from the top players is always a good idea.

Off course Colette is only an example. We can make many more others.

Would you like to try? Think about other concept stores and their social

networks channels. Next lessons we’re going to analyze two successful case

histories in fashion blogger, completely different one from the other, the italian

Chiara Ferragni with The Blonde Salad and Alexa Chung. If you are interested

in analyzing other fashion bloggers or influencers we can do it.

We’re going to see together the evolution of these fashion blogs that we can

consider good examples of blogging. For now, in synthesis, Ferragni started

with an outfit blog called The blonde salad that grew up during these years

changing face moving to a more traditional fashion magazine. Outfits and

similar pictures now are concentrated on Instagram and other social networks,

with some repetitive hashtag like #theblondsaladgoesto… Miami, Los

Angeles, Milan, etc etc. From a few months also Chiara’s sister, Valentina

Ferragni, is part of the game, branding more and more the Ferragni’s name.

Alexa Chung has a different style, not linked with her own family, not so

closely linked to traditional luxury brands. They are both “it girls”, influencers,

testimonials, trendsetters, bloggers…many names to mean the same thing

they are iconic girls that sell their image for money. In the past we had the top

models in the Nineties, after actress, pop singers, and so on.

From the website Indipendent Fashion Bloggers we can read a

chronology of the fashion blogging history till 2012 that I report here for you

(https://heartifb.com/2012/07/12/the-most-important-moments-in-fashion-blog-

ging-history/):

December 1978: As the result of a chance photograph of Greta Garbo, Bill

Cunningham published a group of his impromptu pictures in the New York

Times, which soon became a regular series now known as his street style col-

umn.

1992: Tim Berners-Lee launches the first Web site, which had a “What’s New”

page informing readers about new information related to the Web site.

1994: Claudio Pinhanez of MIT publishes his “Open Diary,” a Web page docu-

menting his life. Also, online diarist Justin Hall gains notoriety for creating a

“personal homepage” on the Web covering his day-to-day activities in very re-

vealing detail.

December 1997: Jorn Barger starts a daily log of interesting Web links pub-

lished in reverse chronological order, calling it Robot Wisdom WebLog. The

term “Weblog” is used online publishers to include any page with frequent

short posts in reverse chronological order.

1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the

publishing of online journals. Other online journaling tools emerge, including

LiveJournal (1999), DiaryLand (1999), Pitas (1999), Blogger (1999), Xanga

(2000), Movable Type (2001) and WordPress (2003).

Spring 1999: Online journal author Peter Merholz takes Jorn Barger’s word

“weblog” and splits it into the phrase “We blog.” Blog soon becomes short-

hand for weblog — and 13 years later it’s still the term we use today!

1999: The development of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication makes it easier

for people to subscribe to blog posts, as well as distribute them to other sites

across the Internet.

2002: Fashion blogs begin to emerge on the internet.

2003: Glam Media, a company with more than 1,500 lifestyle websites and

blogs, including Glam.com, is founded. The basis includes an ad network,

where blogs come together under umbrella advertisements.

September 2003: Kathryn Finney of The Budget Fashionista was invited to

New York Fashion Week.

2003: Using the alias Bboy777, Bryan Grey Yambao joined the blogosphere

and eventually built a following for himself after posting stories about his

weight-loss goals, fashion purchases and hatred for fake designer goods — in

2004 he became “Bryanboy.”

October 2004: Manolo the “Shoe Blogger” starts writing posts to his site.

February 2004: The launch of Flickr, a photo-sharing community, helps popu-

larize photo blogging.

2004: Videographer Steve Garfield launches his video blog and declares

2004 “The Year of the Video Blog,” more than a year before the birth of

YouTube.

2005: Julie Fredrickson creates fashion blogging network Coutorture, which

grows into an online publication, community and blog network comprised of

over 240 editorially selected fashion, beauty, perfume, accessory, and

streetwear blogs.

September 2005: The Sartorialist, aka Scott Schuman, begins blogging about

fashion on the streets. According to an article on Business of Fashion: Ac-

cording to Mr. Schuman, The Sartorialist was originally inspired by Brooklyn-

based writer Grace Bonney’s interior design blog Design*Sponge. “I could tell

she was doing it by herself and I liked the idea that she was having an inter-

action,” he said. “She had like 30 comments on a post and I thought that was

really cool.” Schuman decided to start a similar blog for fashion after examin-

ing a series of photos he had taken of a few stylish guys in New York’s Fulton

fish market while on a photography course.

2006: The Fug Girls start writing for New York Magazine.

2006: The launch of Twitter, one of the first “micro-blogging” communities that

allows user to publish and receive short posts via the Web, text messaging

and instant messaging.

2006: A research report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project esti-

mates that 12 million U.S. adults publish their own blogs.

2006: Julie Fredrickson ambushes Anna Wintour at New York Fashion Week.

2006: Manolo’s Shoe Blog was, “rumored to be [earning] around $700,000 a

year.”

2007: Sugar, the San Francisco site for women’s content, announced it has

acquired Coutorture.

2007: Technorati reports it is tracking more than 112 million blogs worldwide.

2007: Rumi Neely starts posting her vintage finds to eBay.

September 5, 2007: Founded by Jennine Jacob, IFB is created.

March 31, 2008: At age eleven, Tavi Gevinson begins writing “Style Rookie.”

2008: Neely launches a separate site to her eBay account, called “Fashion

Toast,” and posts her first personal style photos.

April 2009: Neely is featured in CNN Money for her blogging business, which

states she was getting “35,000 hits a day.”

September 2009:  IFB hosts an event with two panels about fashion blogging

which evolved into the IFB Conference (and we are now presenting our 7th

conference this September)!

2009: Dolce & Gabbana made news by filling its front row—typically the sole

provenance of A-list actresses and Anna Wintour—with fashion bloggers,

even equipping them with laptops.

2009: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishes its regulations

regarding bloggers.

September 2010: Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky Magazine, leaves

the print biz to start her own blog, at age 48.

2010: Leandra Medine, creator of The Man Repeller, was studying journalism

in college when she started her blog.

2010: The FTC publicly investigates the company Ann Taylor after mandating

an update that stipulates that bloggers must disclose “any material connec-

tions they share with the seller of the product or service” when writing about

it. Bloggers and brands can be fined up to $11,000 for failing to reveal spon-

sorships. According to Mashable, “Ann Taylor invited bloggers to preview its

Summer 2010 LOFT collection, promising attendees a ‘special gift’ and entry

into a ‘mystery gift-card drawing’ for those who submitted posts to the com-

pany within 24 hours of the event. Ann Taylor avowed to reveal the value of

the gift cards, which ranged from $50 to $500, to bloggers after receiving their

posts.” No fines were levied.

October 2011: Notable fashion journalist Derek Blasberg, Harper’s Bazaar

Editor at Large and a published author, starts a blog on the side called, “Mr.

Blasberg.”

June 2012: Scott Schuman states he was disgruntled by the D&G fashion

show back in 2009 in an article by GQ: “[Dolce & Gabbana] got a humongous

amount of press. … ‘Look, we brought the bloggers in and gave them the

front row. Look at the dancing-monkey bloggers!’ ” He then added, “I could

barely bring myself to sit down.”

2012: Nick Axelrod leaves Elle for Emily Weiss’s beauty blog Into The Gloss,

where he is in the early stages of hiring contributing writers.

2012: Leandra Medine is also expanding her content by trying out new writers

so that she may transition from a “blog” to a website — which she describes

as a cross between Vogue and Jezebel.

2012: Tavi Gevinson parlays Style Rookie into Rookie Mag, a larger site for

young women.

So, what’s next in the timeline? It seems that a few of the more prominent per-

sonal bloggers are expanding to develop bigger websites. Does this mean

that bloggers are headed to be the next big time fashion editors, present-

ing their insight on the web rather than in pages of a glossy? What do you

think?

The very first personal style blogs weren’t started as launch pads for fame

(in the form of millions of followers) or fortune (lucrative endorsement deals).

They began quite innocently as creative outlets. A lot has changed in the

last decade. Below, we trace the history of the personal style blog, an internet

phenomenon that has both democratized the fashion industry and turned

shameless narcissism into a viable career path.

From: The racked.com “The definitive history of personal style blogs, from

BryanBoy to ManRepeller” (http://www.racked.com/2015/5/27/8640369/per-

sonal-style-blog-history-tavi-gevinson-bryanboy-rumi-neely) 27 may, 2015

AUGUST 2004 - Patricia Handschiegel founds StyleDiary.net, which is widely

considered the first personal style blog. She will spend several years docu-

menting her outfits and purchases before eventually introducing supplemen-

tary content. In 2007, the blog is sold to social shopping site StyleHive for an

undisclosed sum and Handschiegel, no longer a personal style blogger, be-

comes something of a serial entrepreneur.

OCTOBER 2004 - Bryan Yambao, a 24-year-old label-obsessed web devel-

oper, starts BryanBoy. It's as much a personal style blog (featuring his much-

copied arm-out stance) as a Xanga-inspired diary devoted to his shopping es-

capades and splashy social life in Manila. He becomes famous—fast—and in

2008, Marc Jacobs names a purse after him. This is just the beginning for

Yambao, who continues to sit front row at Fashion Week to this day.

MARCH 2006 - Unsatisfied with her full-time job in digital advertising, London-

based Susie Lau starts Style Bubble as a place to post her colorful looks.

Since she's already a prolific commenter on cult style forum The Fashion

Spot, she gains a steady readership almost immediately. Susie’s signature

camera-in-the-mirror pose becomes incredibly popular among early personal

style bloggers.

SEPTEMBER 2007 - Jennine Jacob of The Coveted starts Independent Fash-

ion Bloggers, an online community for budding personal style bloggers. Today

it has around 30,000 members.

APRIL 2008 - Eleven-year-old Tavi Gevinson starts Style Rookie. She isn't

the first—along with Yambao and Lau, Stephanie of The Fashion Robot,

Lauren of Fops & Dandies, and Agathe of Style Bytes are just a few of the OG

personal style bloggers who helped pave the way—but hers quickly becomes

the most widely-known. Though the novelty of her age certainly piques peo-

ple's interest, she builds up a devoted following because of her unique take on

fashion. In fact, it's so quick-witted and precocious, people initially suggest it's

ghostwritten by an adult.

AUGUST 2008 - USA Today runs a fear-mongering story with the headline,

"Young Fashion Bloggers Are Worrisome Trend to Parents." The newspaper

talks to a bunch of pearl-clutching internet safety advocates, as well as, awe-

somely, Tavi Gevinson’s father. Tavi's dad, Steve Gevinson, wasn't fully

aware that she was blogging until she asked for permission to appear in an

upcoming New York Times magazine story on the subject. "I may have

known, but to me it was a kind of a non-thing to know," Gevinson, a high

school English teacher, says from his home in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. "I

didn't look at it. I wasn't terribly interested in seeing it."

FEBRUARY 2009 - Personal style blogs run by teens become the norm.

Teen Vogue talks to prominent high school-age bloggers, including Arabelle

Sicardi of Fashion Pirate and Jane Aldridge of Sea of Shoes. Theorizing

about the popularity of blogs, Fashion Toast's Rumi Neely—the elder

stateswoman of the bunch at 24—tells the magazine, "The fact that bloggers

are real girls with normal clothing budgets is probably more inspiring than

looking at pictures of celebrities with seemingly endless resources." Oh, how

times will change.

APRIL 2009 - Months after being the first blogger to land a big-deal modeling

contract, Neely gets a gig designing for cool-kid skate brand RVCA. As per

CNN: One of the newest designers for surf and skate label RVCA doesn't

have a design degree, many fashion internships on her resume, or even a

wealth of sewing experience. What she does have is a little unconventional: a

Web site, featuring pictures of her daily outfits, that happens to draw more

than a million hits a month.

OCTOBER 2009 - Oddly, the first documented use of the term "personal style

blogger" comes years after the first personal style blog surfaced. In a story

about Jane Aldridge and her boyfriend Amit, The Cut dubs Aldridge as such.

A blogger in his own right, Amit’s website is called Lame Basics. It no longer

exists, and neither does the romance between the two.

NOVEMBER 2009 - The ultra-exclusive Crillon Ball extends an invitation to a

blogger for the first time ever. Dressed in Chanel haute couture, Texas native

Aldridge makes her grand debut among celebrity offspring and literal

princesses.

DECEMBER 2009 - The Federal Trade Commission puts forth new guidelines

requiring bloggers to disclose if they receive free merchandise or monetary

compensation from brands. The fact that rules are put into place goes to show

just how far personal style blogging—no longer a hobby, now an all-out indus-

try—has come. On the heels of this news, New York Times reporter Eric

Wilson writes a column about bloggers' front row takeover and the tension it's

caused with old-guard fashion editors. PR queen Kelly Cutrone offers him this

gem: "There has been a complete change this year. Do I think, as a publicist,

that I now have to have my eye on some kid who’s writing a blog in Oklahoma

as much as I do on an editor from Vogue? Absolutely. Because once they

write something on the Internet, it’s never coming down. And it’s the first thing

a designer is going to see.”

JANUARY 2010 - Gevinson sits front row at the Dior couture show wearing

an oversized bow that accidentally obscures the view of those behind her. It

isn't the first incident of blogger backlash, but it's definitely the cattiest. An edi -

tor from British glossy Grazia complains about her view, setting the internet

abuzz by tweeting a pic with the caption, "Dior through Tavi's pesky hat."

AUGUST 2010 - WWD vet-turned-marketing whiz Karen Robinovitz, Ralph

Lauren alum Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, and longtime retail and PR exec

Raina Penchansky found Digital Brand Architects, an agency that helps style

bloggers broker deals with fashion labels and negotiate with prospective ad-

vertisers. This is a big step in turning one-man blogs into sustainable busi-

nesses and the pretty girls behind them into full-on celebrities.

SEPTEMBER 2010 - Gevinson, now 14, is profiled in The New Yorker . Writer

Lizzie Widdicombe reveals, among other things, that the eighth-grader has re-

cently hired a publicist and turned down appearances on Oprah, The Tonight

Show, and national morning shows ("It’s so cheesy. The Good Morning Amer-

ica audience—I guess that’s just not a crowd whose eyes I want on me”).

SEPTEMBER 2011 - The era of the creative eccentric taking bedroom selfies

is all but over. An onslaught of girls armed with professional photographers,

slickly designed websites, and "courtesy of" wardrobes officially marks the

tide change. Ad Week sums it up best: There was a moment after New York’s

2009 Fall Fashion Week when fashion bloggers had officially, as the press

likes to call it, "arrived" ... Fast forward two years and fashion’s digerati have

shown they actually have no interest in Wintour’s job. They’d rather sit across

the table from her, as the faces of the companies whose ads keep publica-

tions like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and W in the black. Bloggers don’t want to

be editors, because they’ve built something much more valuable: brands.

JUNE 2012 - Women’s Wear Daily publishes a story reporting just how much

bloggers make from brand deals. The numbers cited include $20,000 for host-

ing events and up to $25,000 for Fashion Week projects. Song of Style's

Aimee Song, who has teamed up with everyone from Seven for All Mankind to

Smart Car, admits to charging one brand $50,000 for a collaboration. The piece goes on to question the journalistic integrity of bloggers.

AUGUST 2013 - Leandra Medine gives her blog a makeover, relaunching

Man Repeller as a full-blown fashion website by ditching the DIY vibe and hir-

ing a staff. And with that, one of the most popular personal style blogs is a

personal style blog no more.

SEPTEMBER 2014 - As bloggers become full-service online personalities

who exist on various platforms, many are accused of buying followers on so-

cial media by the blog obsessives over at Get Off My Internets. Among the

bloggers caught in the crossfire are Song, Jessica Quirk of What I Wore, and

Rachel Parcells of Pink Peonies. The use of Photoshop also becomes a hot-

button topic in the community around this time.

APRIL 2014 - Robin Givhan declares the golden era of fashion blogging over,

while New York Magazine explores the phenomenon of bloggers enlisting

their photographer boyfriends to take photos for their sites. When personal

style bloggers first started out, most of their outfit photos were either mirror-re-

flection snaps or amateur self-timer shots; at some point, bloggers began get-

ting their beaus to take photos (or maybe they collectively sought out budding

photographers to date?). One such prominent example is Colin Sokol, who

took all of Rumi Neely's photos until they split in 2012. He has since sworn off

dating bloggers.

JANUARY 2015 - It's announced that three personal style bloggers, Chiara

Ferragni of The Blonde Salad, Zanita Whittington of Zanita, and Nicole Warne

of Gary Pepper Girl, will cover Lucky—a first for a major fashion magazine.

FEBRUARY 2015 - In early February, Pinterest removes affiliate links, a huge

source of revenue for many personal style bloggers. A few weeks later, an-

other blow hits blogs when Condé Nast announces it is shuttering NowMani-

fest, an invite-only blogging platform used by Neely, Susie Lau, and other big

names.

MAY 2015 - In a story titled, "The Newest Fashion Bloggers Don't Even Have

Blogs," Refinery29 takes a look at the future of personal style bloggers—a fu-

ture that doesn’t involve blogs at all. Their websites have become increasingly

polished and photoshopped, often appearing more like magazine editorials

than real life. Instagram bloggers showcase the opposite approach, promoting an

effortless aesthetic, that—filters aside—seems far less airbrushed than that of

today's most popular fashion bloggers.

Editor: Julia Rubin

Two pillars articles in the storytelling of the evolution of the phenomenon of fashion blogging

“The circus of fashion”, by Suzy Menkes, NYT, 2013We were once described as “black crows” — us fashion folk gathered outside

an abandoned, crumbling downtown building in a uniform of Comme des

Garçons or Yohji Yamamoto. “Whose funeral is it?” passers-by would whisper

with a mix of hushed caring and ghoulish inquiry, as we lined up for the hip,

underground presentations back in the 1990s.

Today, the people outside fashion shows are more like peacocks than crows.

They pose and preen, in their multipatterned dresses, spidery legs balanced

on club-sandwich platform shoes, or in thigh-high boots under sculptured

coats blooming with flat flowers.

There is likely to be a public stir when a group of young Japanese women

spot their idol on parade: the Italian clothes peg Anna Dello Russo. Tall, slim,

with a toned and tanned body, the designer and fashion editor is a walking

display for designer goods: The wider the belt, the shorter and puffier the skirt,

the more outré the shoes, the better. The crowd around her tweets madly:

Who is she wearing? Has she changed her outfit since the last show? When

will she wear her own H&M collection? Who gave her those mile-high shoes?!

The fuss around the shows now seems as important as what goes on inside

the carefully guarded tents. It is as difficult to get in as it always was, when

passionate fashion devotees used to appear stealthily from every corner hop-

ing to sneak in to a Jean Paul Gaultier collection in the 1980s. But the differ-

ence is that now the action is outside the show, as a figure in a velvet shoul -

der cape and shorts struts his stuff, competing for attention with a woman in a

big-sleeved blouse and supertight pants.

You can hardly get up the steps at Lincoln Center, in New York, or walk along

the Tuileries Garden path in Paris because of all the photographers snapping

at the poseurs. Cameras point as wildly at their prey as those original pa-

parazzi in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” But now subjects are ready and willing to

be objects, not so much hunted down by the paparazzi as gagging for their at-

tention.

Ah, fame! Or, more accurately in the fashion world, the celebrity circus of peo-

ple who are famous for being famous. They are known mainly by their Face-

book pages, their blogs and the fact that the street photographer Scott Schu-

man has immortalized them on his Sartorialist Web site. This photographer of

“real people” has spawned legions of imitators, just as the editors who dress

for attention are now challenged by bloggers who dress for attention.

Having lived through the era of punk and those underground clubs in Lon-

don’s East End, where the individuality and imagination of the outfits were fas-

cinating, I can’t help feeling how different things were when cool kids loved to

dress up for one another — or maybe just for themselves.

There is a genuine difference between the stylish and the showoffs — and

that is the current dilemma. If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The an-

swer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion.

There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-con-

scious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks.

Now that women and men (think of the über-stylish Filipino blogger Bryanboy,

whose real name is Bryan Grey Yambao) are used to promote the brands that

have been wily enough to align themselves with people power, even those

with so-called street style have lost their individuality.

Smartphones are so fabulous in so many ways that it seems daft to be nostal-

gic about the days when an image did not go round the world in a nanosec-

ond. In the mid-1990s, when I stopped having to run from the shows to the

film developing lab and first saw digital images, I blessed technology and was

convinced that my working life was changing for the better. I had no inkling of

the role that images would play, pitting fashion’s professionals — looking at

shows for their own purposes of buying or reporting — against an online judge

and jury. While fashion pros tend to have personal agendas related to their

work, bloggers start a critical conversation that can spread virally.

Many of these changes have been exhilarating. It is great to see the commen-

taries from smart bloggers — especially those in countries like China or Rus-

sia, where there was, in the past, little possibility of sharing fashion thoughts

and dreams — although I am leery about the idea that anyone can be a critic,

passing judgment after seeing a show (from the front only and in distorted

color) on Style.com or NowFashion. But two things have worked to turn fash-

ion shows into a zoo: the cattle market of showoff people waiting to be chosen

or rejected by the photographers, and the way that smart brands, in an at-

tempt to claw back control lost to multimedia, have come in on the act. Marc

Jacobs was the first designer to sense the power of multimedia. When he

named a bag after Bryanboy in 2008, he made the blogger’s name, and

turned on an apparently unending shower of designer gifts, which are warmly

welcomed at bryanboy.com.

Many bloggers are — or were — perceptive and succinct in their comments.

But with the aim now to receive trophy gifts and paid-for trips to the next round

of shows, only the rarest of bloggers could be seen as a critic in its original

meaning of a visual and cultural arbiter.

Adhering to the time-honored journalistic rule that reporters don’t take gifts

(read: bribes), I am stunned at the open way bloggers announce which de-

signer has given them what. There is something ridiculous about the self-ag-

grandizement of some online arbiters who go against the mantra that I was

taught in my earliest days as a fashion journalist: “It isn’t good because you

like it; you like it because it’s good.” Slim chance of that idea catching on

among the fashion bloggers. Whether it is the sharp Susie Bubble or the

bright Tavi Gevinson, judging fashion has become all about me: Look at me

wearing the dress! Look at these shoes I have found! Look at me loving this

outfit in 15 different images!

Fashion has to some extent become mob rule — or, at least, a survival of the

most popular in a melee of crowdsourcing. The original “Project Runway,” a

television show that chose participants with at least a basic knowledge of

fashion, has been followed worldwide by “American Idol”-style initiatives, in

which a public vote selects the fashion winner. Who needs to graduate from

Central Saint Martins in London or New York’s Fashion Institute of Technol-

ogy when a homemade outfit can go viral on YouTube with millions of hits?

Playing King Canute and trying to hold back the wave of digital fashion stuff is

doomed for failure. But something has been lost in a world where the survival

of the gaudiest is a new kind of dress parade. Perhaps the perfect answer

would be to let the public preening go on out front, while the show moves,

stealthily, to a different and secret venue, with the audience just a group of

dedicated pros — dressed head to toe in black, of course.

“ The Golden Era of ‘ Fashion Blogging ’ Is Over ”, by Robin Givham, NYMagazine, 2016Until about a decade ago, there had always been an unwritten protocol when

seated in the front row of a fashion show. Do not lean forward. Keep your legs

tucked neatly under your seat, your handbag out of camera range, and any

papers discretely in your lap. Maintain a poker face. And do not take pictures.

Seriously.

It’s hard to believe, but back before the dawn of the 21st century, it was the

rare editor who dared lift a camera to snap a shot of a model as she stormed

past. Gilles Bensimon, the former creative director of Elle Magazine, was the

most notable violator of this unwritten rule. Dressed in his signature white

jeans, Bensimon — a professional photographer — regularly took pictures

from his front-row perch. But others who attempted such sacrilege were not

given the same leeway. Gladys Perint Palmer, the former fashion editor of

the San Francisco Examiner, was an accomplished illustrator and often took

photographs to inspire her drawings. On multiple occasions, I sat stunned as

security guards practically tackled her when she pulled out her camera at a

show.

Unauthorized photography was taboo, because the fashion industry was a

walled-off community of designers, editors, and retailers. Information was em-

bargoed. Shows were not live-streamed. Access was given grudgingly.

In the mid-2000s, however, bloggers changed that dynamic. These fashion

guerillas hoisted their digital cameras, their iPhones, and their iPads aloft in

order to capture the drama on the runway — and its environs — and transmit

it directly to their followers. They live-blogged and they tweeted and they initi -

ated a real-time conversation where once only silence existed. The first gen-

eration of bloggers, such as Bryan Yambao, Susanna Lau, Tavi Gevinson,

and Scott Schuman were contrarians. In their words and images, there was

an earnest and raw truth that did not exist in traditional outlets. They had

unique points of view and savvy marketing strategies. They had a keen

awareness of how technology could help them attract the attention of hun-

dreds of thousands of like-minded fashion fans who had been shut out of the

conversation. 

Soon, the fashion world signaled its wholehearted approval. By 2008, Marc

Jacobs had named a handbag after Bryanboy, who created the template of

the self-referential fashion blogger when he began kibitzing online in 2004. In

2009, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana seeded their front row with

Bryanboy, Tommy Ton, Schuman, and Garance Doré, who were expected to

live-blog the show. And by 2010, a reporter from Grazia tweeted her displea-

sure at being stuck behind the view-blocking Stephen Jones plumage of

Gevinson as she sat front row at a Christian Dior couture show in Paris.

Longtime editors realized that some of these self-created young men and

women — many of whom had not paid their dues fetching coffee and steam-

ing samples — now had a personal audience of a half-million people. The

reach of bloggers threatened to upend the traditional hierarchy of fashion cover-

age.

Slowly, the legacy media fought back. Editors went on the offensive. Gla-

mour editor Cindi Leive, Lucky’s Eva Chen,  Joe Zee (formerly of Elle), Nina

Garcia of Marie Claire — the very people who once were envied for their

front-row view of fashion week — were now tapping out quips and bon mots

to all who would listen. Legacy editors began watching the runway from the

backside of their iPhone cameras as they shared their up-close views with the

virtual world. Critics, instead of reserving their droll commentary for post-show

dinner patter, now spewed it fast and succinctly on Twitter.

With everyone from powerhouse editors-in-chief to creative directors and

standard-bearing critics playing the social-media game, the singular advan-

tage that social media once offered bloggers is no longer so clear. The same

intimate tone, once unique to those initial disrupters, can now be found in the

Twitter feeds of print folks such as Chen, Derek Blasberg, and Mickey Board-

man. They live-blog while at shows, while zipping through airports, while tour-

ing art exhibitions, while vacationing. They un-self-consciously share from all

corners of their fashion lives.

The distance between the Establishment and fashion’s once-dazzling revolu-

tionaries has narrowed, and there is minimal distinction between them. Be-

cause what the fashion industry loves, it woos — then swallows whole. 

Bryanboy told me he doesn’t consider himself an “insider,” but evidence sug-

gests his generation of bloggers is no longer made up of “outsiders” either.

Fashion followers can thank bloggers for making fashion coverage more democratic and forcing design houses to accept (and then exploit) the reality that very little communication is for insiders’ ears only. But, now that so many bloggers have been embraced by the industry — and the Old Guard has learned to keep up with social media — is there still an opportunity for new voices at shows? And if so, what kind of voices can still flourish?

“The thing that was different for the first generation was [most of us] rarely put

ourselves on our blogs. The newer generation is all about themselves. What

can we get out of this? It’s much, much more about self-promotion,” says

Schuman, who, along with Doré, won a CFDA award in 2012. “It’s me, me,

me. Look at me. Aren’t I cool? Look at this bright, shiny world I’m portraying.”

"Who am I to say don’t take the handbag, or don’t take advantage of the op-

portunities," Schuman adds. “But don’t expect people to respect what you do.”

“We’re getting to a tipping point. People are starting to push back,” he says.

“They want to be able to believe what [bloggers] are saying.”While the virtual

world may be limitless, real-world guest lists are finite. There are only so

many seats at fashion shows. As the media environment has changed,

there are more seats being allocated to digital media. Yet, those additional

seats are mostly occupied by the online editors of print publications.

“In the original grid, it was very clear what each person did,” says Rachna

Shah, managing director of KCD Digital. “Now there are so many ways you

can be involved in fashion coverage. A blogger might get backstage access

but might be asked to stand at the show. The question is: What do they need

from the show? To interview the designer? To see the show? To have their

picture taken in front of the show?”

As Leandra Medine, founder of the Man Repeller, wrote in an email, per-

sonal-style blogs still “[seem] to gain incredible traction — which is vastly ad-

mirable in its own right — similarly to the way reality television stars did in the

early aughts.”

The more nuanced lifestyle, contextualized, opinion-driven blog “takes a bit

more time to establish itself, finesse its point and earn the following,” Medine

said. “Of course the question is really what happens long term, but I don't

have an answer.”

The Establishment, however, will not give up ground easily. And mostly, new-

comers are drawn to fashion, not because they are determined to change it,

but because they are mesmerized by it. They want to be the next Anna Win-

tour — not make her existence obsolete. They love fashion. And fashion loves

them back. Then swallows them whole.

Press Review - other important articles About Instagram bloggers you must read this article: “For young brands, is

the histogram opportunity shrinking?” by Helena Pike, 5 October 2016, on

Business of Fashion (https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/

intelligence/for-young-brands-is-the-instagram-opportunity-shrinking)

and “Meet fashion’s super influencers: the women with the power to charge

58.000 dollars for one Instagram post” by Emma Spending, The Telegraph, 6

October 2016 ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/people/meet-fashions-su-

per-influencers-the-women-with-the-power-to-char/)

about the importance of naming/branding: “3 Fashion start-ups tapping tough

categories” by Lauren Sherman, The Business of Fashion, 11 October 2016 (

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/3-fashion-start-ups-

tapping-tough-categories-hatch-universal-standard-black-tux )

about fashion news about campaigns, fashion movies, moves of top

managers, creative directors etc the fashion blog The Impression started in

2014: http://theimpression.com