I must admit, I'm not overly excited by couture fashion. I like clothing and I like the effects of time and personalization have on garments, but otherwise, I'm relatively unengaged with the subject. One thing that continually interests me however is how the fashion industry is adjusting to various new media, the advent of the internet blogger and the potential demise of authoritative fashion knowledge.
Blogging has certainly changed the way we receive, contribute and edit information. We are now seeing that anybody can appeal to somebody, somewhere from anywhere in the world, without having to pass the judgement of the top brass on Madison Avenue. Publication is an expensive business, and advertising is what makes the real money for these people, so offering the opportunity to publish yourself for free across Wordpress, Tumblr or Youtube means everybody is now a critic.
Susie Erskine, on her twitter announced that one PR she spoke to at London Fashion Week stated they had received ten applications from bloggers last year in contrast to the 300 received this year. This has provoked a lot of people to ask the question, should bloggers be allowed to attend Fashion Week as well as traditional media? There are a lot of articles online arguing that bloggers should be seperated, and only established bloggers should be allowed to attend, continuously perpetuating the comfortable status quo that this clique has created for itself (and subsequently missing a whole spectrum of thought and progression within the industry). Or, on the other hand, is this a sensible move, questioning the untrained internet blogger as nothing but a rogue journalist? One thing is for sure, the use of real time applications such as Twitter is revolutionising an industry that was famous for its heavily edited media, by allowing users to upload information at the touch of a button, in its raw state before the editors have an opportunity to touch it. I find this extremely exciting, and the way that fashion houses and marketing teams are going to either exploit or inhibit this is going to be an interesting topic for discussion over the next few weeks.
The internet has a continuously growing readership, with more people becoming adjusted to new technology, and seeing a growing importance for the blogging community, and with no control over content, this means current PR and marketing rules go out of the window which must be a scary realisation for an industry that appears to have been stuck in the mud for a long time.
The world of blogging has translated into some very exciting prospects for some people: h(y)r collective have gone on to put our their own publication Inventory as well as a stockroom full of exciting brands; Scott Schumann has bought sartorial attention to people around the world in the comfort of their own home; and brands have been consistently using blogs, twitter accounts and other networking sites to allow users to engage at a much deeper level with their products.
This is the age of the amateur. Nobody paid me to write this.
