ABSTRACT
Fashion bloggers are part of the landscape now, but when they first emerged in the mid-2000s they were met with bafflement and some derision. Designers were used to controlling visual coverage of their products by
lending samples to fashion editors and suitable celebrities. They were not used to critical reviews, in magazines at least. Then along came bloggers who could be anyone, could publish anything
they wanted, and who couldn’t be threatened by the withdrawal of advertising or access. Susanna Lau, who launched her Style Bubble blog in 2006, described in
2009 how she’d been ordered by Pam Hogg’s PR to take down a photo she’d taken of herself in a catsuit by the British designer because it was ‘bad publicity’. ‘I’m not the calibre of person Pam Hogg wants photographed in her catsuits,’
a hurt Lau wrote (Lau, 2009). Even when Dolce & Gabbana filled the front row of its spring-summer
2010 show with bloggers – considered a watershed moment in fashion and the Internet – some in the industry were unconvinced. ‘It’s all a bit mad, isn’t it? I think it will die down though,’ designer
Christopher Kane told Vogue. ‘No one who wants to read a serious review of a show is going to look at what a 14-year-old thinks’ (in Milligan, 2009). Contrary to Kane’s expectations, it didn’t die down. Fashion PRs saw the
huge number of followers that bloggers commanded and decided they needed to care what 14-year-old Style Rookie blogger Tavi Gevinson thought, and others like her. Bloggers were given tickets to fashion weeks, invited to launches and
events, hired as ‘brand ambassadors’ and bombarded with products in the hope of favourable coverage. The mainstream media, too, began to accept bloggers as style influencers,
hiring them as street-style photographers, writing profiles on them and asking them to guest-edit collections. But by 2013, there were signs that a backlash was on its way. Renowned
journalist Suzy Menkes, writing in the New York Times T Magazine in February,
lamented the fact that many bloggers took pride in accepting gifts and trips from fashion houses and thus could not call themselves serious critics. ‘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!’ she wrote (Menkes, 2013). Garage magazine followed up with a widely-discussed video called ‘Take
My Picture’ (Zhukova and Ha, 2013). In it, Style.com critic Tim Blanks said the whole street-style phenomenon had gone too far. ‘It makes monsters; it doesn’t make gods,’ he said. ‘It’s coarsened things.’ It reflected what some fashion and magazine editors had been saying pri-
vately: that bloggers had had their moment in the sun, there were too many of them, and they were no longer to be taken seriously. Perhaps, though, the whole blogging versus journalism debate misses the
point. Bloggers are, like journalists, telling a story about fashion, but it’s a different
kind of story – not one based on technical knowledge or informed criticism, perhaps, but rather one where fashion meets real life. In his book Style Feed: The World’s Top Fashion Blogs, edited with Susanna
Lau, William Oliver writes: ‘They may offer different perspectives on fashion to the ones we are historically used to, but they highlight the excitement felt by real people who actually wear, or want to wear, the clothes featured’ (2012: 14). Whether or not journalists think this is valid, it’s appealing to brands who
want to harness that excitement and incorporate bloggers into their marketing strategy. And, again regardless of what journalists think, a lot of young people are
turning to blogs and social media ahead of print publications to get guidance and inspiration on fashion and beauty. Chris Morton, chief executive of social curation site Lyst, told the Business of
Fashion website: ‘We believe the future of advertising is personal recommendation. People are much more likely to act on a recommendation than a broadcast message’ (in Kansara, 2011a). Knowing which way the wind was blowing, and keen to go where their
audiences were, magazines and newspapers have worked hard on building up their presence online, on apps and on social media. But is it enough? Take Elle, the prestigious fashion glossy, which describes
itself as ‘the most digitally innovative luxury fashion magazine in the UK market place today’ (Hearst, 2013). In September 2013, it had 0.5 million Twitter followers, 200,000 Instagram followers and 3,325 YouTube subscribers, as well as over 850,000 Facebook likes. Next, take Zoe Sugg, a 20-something fashion and beauty blogger from the
UK (www.zoella.co.uk). She hadn’t often been written about in the mainstream media, but she had more than 680,000 Twitter followers, almost a million Instagram followers and more than two million subscribers on YouTube.
