A new collection, a shock resignation, a coke scandal, a red-carpet disaster: within minutes of happening, everything is online, being dissected and disseminated by an army of self-made - and often young - fashion correspondents. Belinda McKeon reports 'FASHIONOLOGIE BLOGS FROM HER DORM ROOM, AND THE BLOGGERS BEHIND I AM FASHION SAY THEY CAN'T TAKE TIME OFF SCHOOL TO GO TO SHOWS'
Last September visitors to Julie Fredrickson's popular New York blog Almost Girl (http://almostgirl. coffeespoons.org) found themselves witnessing something of a media milestone. It was Fashion Week, The Devil Wears Prada had just been released and every camera in Manhattan was aimed towards the Ice Queen: Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, who is greeted with a cocktail of panic and sycophancy everywhere she goes. And suddenly there she was, sitting in an empty tent at Bryant Park with a determined, microphone-wielding Fredrickson, giving an impromptu interview about fashion to a shaky hand-held camera.
After what seemed like hardly a minute of conversation Wintour's publicist swooped and cut the interview short. But Fredrickson had got her scoop. And fashion blogging - no longer quite so much the little guy, the embarrassing cousin of the glossies, the shabby intruder lurking at the back - had got its stripes. Wintour had given the time of day to a blogger, and, through the traditional fashion media and the blogosphere alike, the aftershock made itself known.
Within weeks hundreds of fashion blogs had signed up to Coutorture.com, the blog network founded by Fredrickson to promote the online fashion community; they also, through Fredrickson's efforts, had been granted recognition of their blog coverage and video footage of the shows by IMG, the agency that owns New York Fashion Week.
By the February shows every major player in the fashion press had a blogging component to its online presence - not just the magazines but also the New York Times, whose fashion critic, Cathy Horyn, now blogs - and the fashion bloggers were not just occasional presences in the tents: they were at every show.
In many ways, blogging about fashion does exactly what it says on the tin. It creates a community of rapid, informed responses to developments in the fashion world, frothy or otherwise. A new collection, a shock resignation, a coke scandal, a red-carpet disaster: within minutes of happening, everything is online, being dissected and disseminated by an army of self-made fashion correspondents. Photoshoots from Vogue and Elle are critiqued as if they were Godard movies. Pleats at Lanvin, fur at Fendi, helmets at Balenciaga: no sooner have they tripped down the catwalk than they're on the blogs. Add a regular round of paeans to gorgeous pieces from the ever-increasing inventories of online stores, such as Net-a-Porter and La Garçonne, and you've got the building blocks of a successful fashion blog.
The Daily Obsession (http://thedailyobsession.wordpress.com) fits smartly into this mould. Its editors, who wish to remain anonymous, see their approach as that of empowered consumers. "Bloggers can get information out there before print publications," they say, "and blogs are therefore changing the way the market sees products and designs."
The freedom that their anonymity gives them, combined with the large numbers of readers their sites now attract (up to an average of 6,000 a day) means sites such as the Daily Obsession, Fashionologie (www.fashionologie.com) and I Am Fashion (http://iamfashion.blogspot.com) can make a difference to how the fashion industry's players are perceived - and how well its products sell.
They also subtly tweak attitudes to style itself. One London-based blogger, Susanna Lau at Style Bubble (http://stylebubble.typepad.com) has become something of a household name in fashion circles for her interpretations of catwalk looks - she constructs her outfits as homages to, or departures from, the new collections, then puts photographs of the usually idiosyncratic (not to mention much cheaper) results online.
And at his hugely popular site the Sartorialist (http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com) Scott Schuman posts the photographs he takes every day of stylish men and women on the streets of Manhattan (and now around Europe, as he travels the fashion-show circuit) and asks his tens of thousands of readers to comment. "People don't have to agree with me," says Schuman, who began blogging "on a whim" two years ago and has become a fashion celebrity - he blogs for Style.com and writes a column for GQ magazine, and Saks Fifth Avenue featured an exhibition of his photographs in its windows last year. "But my policy is, if they wouldn't say it to the face of the person in the photograph, then it shouldn't go up. The focus is on the outfit, not the person. This is not American Idol."
At the heart of this crop of blogs, too, is a love of the stuff of fashion, and pervading the intelligent writing is an earnestness, an energy, explained in part, perhaps, by the fact that some of the best-known fashion bloggers are barely into their 20s. Fashionologie blogs from her dorm room, and the bloggers behind I Am Fashion say they can't take time off school to go to fashion shows. And, along with the eagerness, there often comes aspiration. Yes, many fashion bloggers drool over Topshop, but they also drool over Chloé, Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada. A post casually mentioning the merits of a $500 necklace or a $400 pair of shoes is not out of the ordinary.
Surprisingly, the Irish fashion blogosphere has not yet dived into this melee of aspiration, but then the Irish fashion blogosphere seems to consist, so far, of only one dedicated blog. And Marian Roche set up Style Treaty (http://styletreaty.com), her Limerick-based site, last year partly out of frustration at US- and UK-based sites. "They always featured shops that weren't in Ireland, let alone Limerick," she says. "And a lot of what they featured was way beyond the budget of a lot of Irishwomen."
Her focus is not only the realistically priced and the wearable but also the local. "If I can put positive images of Limerick, and especially Limerick women, out there, then it can't hurt."
Julie Fredrickson, whose blog focuses less on objects of desire than on the cultural and social forces at work in the art and commerce of fashion, argues that the best fashion blogging is much less about obsession with the material possessions of fashion - which, as she pointed out in a recent post, comes from the same root as the obsession with empty celebrity - than it is about analysis, inquiry and original perspectives.
She points to two inside-track blogs that are a little different, and all the more revealing for it: Verbal Croquis (http://verbalcroquis.wordpress.com), a blog about fashion design written by a designer, and Fashion-Incubator (http://fashion-incubator.com), Kathleen Fasanella's blog about the manufacture of fashion in sustainable, fair, planet-friendly conditions.
"If you buy too much into the aspiration to be something else, eventually you stop responding to [ all the aspiration-driven] blogs, because you never become that thing," says Fredrickson. "But if you inspire yourself and others to live a more aesthetically pleasing life, I think that speaks to people more readily."