The fashion industry

One of the UK’s best-known fashion journalists, Colin McDowell, has said that there’s no point even trying to write about fashion if you can’t describe the exact construction of a sleeve. While you don’t actually have to know how to put together a blouse to be

a reporter, McDowell is right that good journalists should have a strong understanding of their field. ‘You wouldn’t expect to become an architecture critic without knowing

anything about architecture, and it’s not enough to say “Well, I live in a house,”’ says Harriet Walker, news editor at former style and beauty website Never Underdressed. ‘That’s why you have to make sure that you’re not just a person who likes

clothes’ (2013a). A good understanding of the fashion industry – how it’s financed, how

designers work, how clothes are manufactured, how branding operates, how garments are sold and how people wear them – will make you a much more effective and thoughtful journalist. Of course, the fashion industry and journalists work pretty closely together,

as we’ve already seen in Chapter 3. Fashion journalists work as consultants for brands, and stylists and photographers will simultaneously work for both magazines, for credibility, and on brands’ advertising campaigns and lookbooks (shots of their clothes on models), for money. So they already know a lot about each other – but what’s lacking, some

commentators say, is critical distance and informed analysis of how the fashion system works. ‘It’s a money-making industry that is able to harness what is an instinctive

and emotional desire to dress up and sell it back to us as a set of seasonal rules,’ says Caryn Franklin, ex-presenter of the BBC’s The Clothes Show and fashion commentator. ‘Deconstructing that bit is an important part of being a journalist, being

able to question what that’s all about’ (2013).