People who want lasting careers in fashion media won’t find it by simply inviting the world to ogle their clothes.
The Blonde Salad wearing a fluffy blue hat front row at a New York Fashion Week show in February.
When the fashion industry talks about "bloggers," they often mean personal style bloggers — people who post photos of themselves wearing clothes. Of course, "blogger" is a terribly inaccurate term, because it could describe just about any fashion critic, photographer, or journalist covering fashion. Just about everyone's work goes on something that could be considered a "blog" these days. Lots of journalists write for what you might call a blog, but would they most accurately be described as "bloggers"?
I'd argue no — not anymore. Especially since a new kind of site is starting to dominate fashion media, and there's a lot more to them than just blogging — and certainly a lot more to them than personal style blogging. This new site is something between a blog and an online magazine. It's usually the brainchild of a founder who never got into blogging so that people could enthuse over how she looks wearing clothes. They are sites like Into the Gloss, Business of Fashion, and P.S. I Made This. They possess excellent design, routinely produce originally reported articles, and are gaining more and more access to the world's most important fashion people and events. More robust than blogs, they're helmed by talented, trained editors whom the term "blogger" doesn't seem to do justice. Their sites tend to possess fewer resources than those attached to big media companies, like Vogue.com. But no matter: Advertisers are signing up while these fledgling online magazines and newspapers solidify their status as the industry's must-reads. And they're quite comfortably removed from the personal style blogging phenomenon — a fad that finally seems to be on the way out.
The industry became hyper-aware of personal style bloggers a few years ago, when they started sitting in the front rows of fashion week shows. This was, albeit in an industry often rocked by uproar over affronts outsiders would view as benign, a controversial and borderline shocking move. While internet media had been attending shows for several years, the prominent positioning of these "bloggers" unsettled dozens of writers, stylists, and fashion editors who had been plugging away at their own ladder-climbing for a decade or several, striving for a view of the Dolce & Gabbana show on par with Vogue editor Anna Wintour's. And here, some upstart stylish young things with cute faces, immaculate clothing collections, and a keen understanding of the internet and social media had breezed their way up to the front row in a just short time simply by posting to the internet, in an aesthetically pleasing and cohesive fashion, photos of themselves wearing things alongside the occasional snap of some food they might eat. So, what business did these twentysomething — and in some cases, teenage — bloggers have sitting so close to the runway, making the hard work of everyone behind them seem rather pointless?
Well, they had two functions: One, they publicized these shows for sizable audiences of equally fashion-obsessed people. Two, they served as mini-celebrities, who would get photographed, tweeted about, pointed at, and whispered about the way a CW actress might.
This job of being an internet fashion celebrity became very appealing, especially as bloggers started figuring out how to monetize their sites and, more importantly, themselves. They sell banner ads, sure, but those don't even comprise the bulk of some of the most successful fashion bloggers' incomes. Now bloggers like the Man Repeller collect fees just to wear things on their blogs. (Update: Sources told BuzzFeed Fashion that Man Repeller's Leandra Medine has asked for payment in exchange for wearing a brand's clothes on her site, but Medine denies this claim, saying she's never been paid to wear anything on her site.) They also get paid to host parties — something the fashion world is never short on. And they might get deals to write books or collaborate with brands on everything from lines of jewelry (see: Atlantic-Pacific) to fur bow ties (see: Bryanboy). As a result, at fashion week, there seems to be a mad rush to get attention any which way, and young people show up wearing anything that could possibly get them photographed and publicized online. A lot of these attention-seekers are trying to legitimize their own Blonde Salad ambitions.
This shameless preening has a lot to do with why a lot of people in the industry — who quietly roll their eyes at personal style bloggers, disgusted by the medium's shameless narcissism — wouldn't miss them. But in the years following their emergence, a few things always kept that hushed disgust from quashing these blogs:
1. Commerce. These bloggers have large audiences who buy the things they link to.
2. Novelty. Fashion loves the new, the now, the next more than just about any industry. That's exactly what this generation of internet stars represents.
3. The industry's confusion over how to make the most of the internet without anchoring to an already successful personality. Up until a couple years ago, fashion trade paper Women's Wear Daily would run articles that did nothing more than announce a major brand had decided to join Facebook. You can see (and yet, you can't) a brand's logic: Fashion bloggers seemed to have it all figured out already, so why not align with them?
But brands are becoming digitally savvier. The novelty of the personal style blog has worn off. And the best, most successful personal style bloggers either don't even need their sites anymore or have expanded them to be about more than just their personal style.
The smartest, most successful personal style bloggers use their online followings as launching pads for not just those kinds of partnerships, but also modeling and entertainment careers. Fashion Toast's Rumi Neely signed with Next modeling agency and became the face of Forever 21. Bryanboy is now a regular on America's Next Top Model. The Blonde Salad appears to have spokesmodel-esque partnerships with huge brands like Nike and Seven for All Mankind. These incredible successes are part of the reason the personal style blogging medium is simply not self-sustaining. A lot of the earliest successful personal style bloggers are visible enough that they don't seem to need much more than their widely followed Twitter feeds these days to stay visible. This is not necessarily bad for the bloggers, who probably don't want to blog forever. The smartest personal style bloggers think from the beginning about how to use their followings to launch lasting careers that transcend a single website. Should they want to leave their sites behind to pursue what might feel like more meaningful opportunities, they surely could. Fashion never shunned people who were famous in the industry for vaguely discernible reasons, so the earliest personal style bloggers could very well use their fame and following to continue careers as spokesmodels, brand consultants, stylists, etc.
