BUZZ NEWS

Laptop-Toting Bloggers Invade Fashion’s Frontlines

Posted on December 30, 2009
Angela Natividad

Given that you’re reading this, you probably don’t need anyone to explain the importance of blogging to you — or the growing relevance of bloggers to industry events.

One of Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s favourite war stories is about how bloggers cause disruptions at conferences like SXSW, where users livetweet which sessions are hot and generate mass exoduses or entries before the speakers have even finished their warmup jokes.

But it seems the industry having the toughest time accepting this is the one most vulnerable to user caprice: high fashion. Runway shows, whose front rows are usually reserved for hardboiled icons like Vogue’s Anna Wintour, are apparently being invaded by new-schoolers that spent a handful of years building their reputations.

Some are easier to bear than others. Glammed-out blogger couple Garance Doré and Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist) are a case in point; the latter was labeled one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Design Influencers, and the pair have partnered to do work for brands like Gap.

Then you’ve got characters like Bryan Boy, a young Filipino style blogger who was spotted at this year’s Dolce & Gabbana show, two seats away from Wintour herself:

Lawd help us!

It helps that Bryan Boy has endorsement from the likes of Marc Jacobs, who designed a bag in his name. And the sight of him in a seat that most fashionistas would kill their mothers for was probably somewhat more endurable than seeing who took the front row at Marc Jacobs’ own show: Tavi Gevinson, the Style Rookie author that some dub The Wunderkind. She’s flown to Tokyo to fête it up with Comme des Garçons, has filmed promotions for Target and even written reviews for Harper’s Bazaar.

Also, she’s 13.

According to The New York Times, it’s not so much her presence in the upper echelons of fashion’s influencer sphere as what she represents: the birth of a new order.

People that have spent years kicking and clawing to become top fashion rag editors are watching the spots they covet fill up with geeks toting laptops. They’re eccentric and young and probably don’t have the blood of their closest friends on their hands.

They’re also plenty faster than magazines: a fashion blogger can post a photo-loaded article about a runway show before the show’s even over; meanwhile, venerable print titles fight for the rights to showcase the collections months from now.

Numbers reflect the change in times. Magazines in general are dealing with mass cutbacks and layoffs; traffic to fashion websites, which are cheaper to produce for obvious reasons (one-man show + free platform FTW!), is only rising. And it isn’t easy for an old-schooler to make the switch; the Times says reading blogs or Twitter posts launched by magazines and newspapers leaves users with "something like the queasy feeling of getting a ’friend’ request from your mother on Facebook."

Ouch.

But of course this is stuff you already know. And in their defense, many designers know it too. In The Financial Times this year, Doo-Ri Chung cited her target client as someone who has a "blog mentality, not a magazine mentality." To elaborate:

"The old idea of reading a magazine and planning ahead, that’s not something that younger customers do. It’s a different world, and designers have to adapt."

Change hurts, but over the long-term it better serves brands to play nice with the so-called "democratization of platforms." It airs out a stale scene. Frankly, the strange sight of Bryan Boy and little Tavi leaves one with a sense that spontaneity and creativity have returned to fashion. And for an industry whose habit is to move with the wind, that can only court delight.

More on this at The New York Times. Image credits go to Style Rookie, Getty Images and Teen Vogue.