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| Bryanboy (centre, with computer), sits between, from left, Suzy Menkes of the Herald Tribune, Michael Roberts of Vanity Fair and US Vogue’s Sally Singer, Anna Wintour and Hamish Bowles, at D&G’s spring/summer 2010 show in Milan |
It’s Milan fashion week and the seats for Dolce & Gabbana’s spring/summer 2010 ready-to-wear show for its D&G line are filling up with the industry’s most influential figures. On the front row, legs crossed, watching from behind customary dark glasses, sits Anna Wintour, celebrated editor of US Vogue magazine. One row back – a small step for man, a giant leap for fashionkind – is Burt Tansky, chief executive of US department store Neiman Marcus.
Also on the front row, nestled between the cashmere-draped shoulders of Sally Singer, US Vogue’s fashion news/features director, and Michael Roberts, Vanity Fair’s fashion and style director, sits a slender, less familiar figure dressed in grey T-shirt, jewelled necklace and tuxedo jacket. Meet Bryan Grey-Yambao, known as Bryanboy to the 215,000 unique users who visit his eponymous blog each day (British Vogue magazine, by comparison, sells just over 200,000 copies a month.)
From the small bedroom in Manila that he describes as “a cocoon”, Bryanboy, 23, has distilled his thoughts, on everything from models’ cellulite to Lady Gaga wearing Alexander McQueen’s latest designs, into a colourful and, for many, compulsive online diary that mixes chatty show commentary with blurred photos of himself in eccentric outfits and select snapshots of the exclusive world of fashion. One recent shot shows British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman plonked on a concrete floor, legs outstretched, head in a good book as a fashion show refuses to start on time. Beneath the picture, Bryanboy writes: “I smiled when I found this photo. She looks so calm reading a book or, perhaps, her notes? ”
Staring at the lens of a camera trained on his front row seat, Bryanboy knows that his thoughts on the catwalk spectacle about to unfold in front of him will make it on to his website before any of his front row neighbours even make it to the next show. His up-to-the-minute commentary is why his readers log on. It is why the Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana invited him. Yet, as he sits squished between industry veterans, his expression seems to ask: “Should I really be here?”
The answer is, of course, yes: fashion bloggers, like the cool kids in school, have become a kind of elite band. Readers catching up with them in offices, bedrooms and internet cafés across the globe look to them for humour, catty criticisms and accessible entertainment that costs them nothing but the energy required to click mouse with forefinger.
Moreover, the best and most popular, such as the Sartorialist, Scott Schuman’s photographic chronicle of what the well-dressed person on the street is wearing (visited by 225,000 people a day), are viewed as tastemakers in much the same way as powerful style journalists such as Wintour and Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune. Brands invite Schuman to consult for them. American Apparel, Net-a-Porter and Hogan advertise on the Sartorialist, and other websites, such as Condé Nast’s Style.com, host a pocket-sized version of his site.
“I speak to you as I speak to any of my other friends,” is how Schuman explains his appeal. “I’m not shackled by advertising or an editor. I shoot men on intuition and I shoot women on absolute experience; the quality of what I shoot is so strong that people really don’t have to ask why.” At one recent signing session for Schuman’s first book, also called The Sartorialist, fans waited in line at Liberty in London for four hours.
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| Tavi, a 13-year-old blogger, at Alexander Wang’s show in New York |
For luxury houses – and indeed for consumers of high-end fashion – the question that needs to be answered is: how far should we embrace, or not embrace, the bloggers? In part this is clearly a generational issue. Those who write and read blogs are mostly young, and mostly not typical consumers of high-end designer fashion. Conversely, luxury goods consumers are generally wealthier and older and, consequently, less likely to be interested in the esoteric musings of Bryanboy or Tavi.
Hugh Devlin, a brand consultant at Withers LLP law firm in London, draws a parallel between such consumers and fervent followers of the royal family: “A royalist is unlikely to want to know too much about the Tupperware on Her Majesty’s breakfast table. Similarly, most consumers of luxury don’t want to see behind the curtain. They want to understand the effort that goes into their products but not all the nitty gritty,” he says.
For the luxury industry, however, the rise of the online fashion commentators cannot be disregarded so easily. Until recently, it tended to view the internet as vast, uncontrollable and even unfathomable, and has been reluctant to pick up on the benefits of online sales, wary of the effects of such mass consumerism on brand values. The likes of Chanel, Versace and Armani do not have online sales sections. They appear, however, to be more enthusiastic about the rise of the bloggers.
Schuman the Sartorialist explains how he sees the change in attitudes: “In the beginning, people [in luxury] were afraid of the internet and the [idea of bloggers’] comments,” he says. “Now they are going after the blogs full steam. The whole thing with Dolce & Gabbana and [bloggers] in the front row, it’s like they realised that if you can’t control it, you might just have to learn to deal with it.”
Antoine Arnault, son of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault and head of communications for Louis Vuitton, adds: “It is not a question of whether online fashion media is a growing force but of where it will stop.” Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s creative director, explains: “It’s important that the bloggers become well respected. They have a very articulate way of expressing an opinion. The difference between bloggers and traditional press is that [bloggers] are often talking directly to a final consumer.”
Consequently, bloggers such as Bryanboy, Tavi and Schuman have been invited inside the fashion tent. Bryanboy’s fans include Bailey at Burberry; Kim Jones, creative director at Dunhill, who invited him personally to attend the brand’s men’s wear show in Paris in June; and new best friend Marc Jacobs, the creative force behind Louis Vuitton, who was so enamoured of the blogger’s musings that he named a bag after him.
It will be intriguing to see how bloggers deal with such flattering attentions. How much harder, for example, will they find it to hold independent opinions on designers when they meet them at the shows? Will they really find it as easy to write about a brand if it advertises with them? In addition, increased influence brings an increase in scrutiny. From December 1, new US Federal Trade Commission guidelines will require bloggers to disclose receipt of free merchandise or payment. It is hoped this will help sort the credible from those who are driven more by the prospect of self-promotion and designer approbation.
With most in luxury circles convinced that bloggers are at the very least, according to Harriet Quick, fashion features director of British Vogue magazine, “a way of reaching new audiences with minimum outlay”, the strategies they are choosing to employ vary.
Last year Gucci chose and paid for a select group of fashion bloggers – including Susie Lau of Stylebubble.com, and those behind Fashion is Spinach and Cory Kennedy – to join Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tom Cruise at the brand’s Unicef/Raising Malawi benefit in New York City. According to Frida Giannini, Gucci’s creative director, the move was “an important lesson” in how to harness the power of bloggers. “They went crazy for the event and generated a significant amount of extra buzz,” she says.
Having witnessed blogging’s ability to reach vast global audiences, brands are lining up to launch new digital strategies of their own. During the recent shows, Louis Vuitton became the first fashion brand to broadcast a catwalk show live, through Facebook from Paris, and 50,000 guests from its 750,000-strong Facebook fanbase logged on to watch. Gucci created a new social networking microsite, linked to an eyewear collection, where users could upload photos of themselves.
And, as the new faces took their places next to Wintour, Menkes et al for the Dolce & Gabbana show, the Italian brand’s in-house cameras rolled, streamlining the event directly on to YouTube. “With 16m hits in a few days our brand channel [a customised YouTube page] was the most visited in the world,” says Domenico Dolce.
Not every technological embrace is so sure-footed. During the shows brands such as Burberry and Gucci bypassed the blogs and turned to Twitter, but tended to ignore the intrinsically inconsequential nature of this medium. The resulting tweets (of the “Wow, have you seen our new line/celebrity in our new clothes/new store” variety) show less understanding of the Twitter ethos than, say, the ramblings of designer Alexander McQueen, which range from the sort-of professional (“the shoes ... the shoes ... the shoes”) to the random (“at Frieze Art Fair in a f***ing queue”) and which have won him 14,573 followers so far, according to twitterholic.com.
The signs are that fashion, that most elite of worlds, sees the value of becoming more accessible. With the release this autumn of the documentary The September Issue, the day-to-day dramas of the world’s most glamorous style journal were revealed for all to see. But does demystifying fashion also strip it of its glamour?
Scott Schuman thinks not: “Previously fashion was so alien and so hierarchical. Bloggers show the average person that they too can be part of it – that this is what it’s really like.” So by unveiling an industry shrouded in mystery, the appeal of that industry is actually enhanced.
According to brand consultant Hugh Devlin, most bloggers understand that people are only interested in fashion because it’s about a dream. “What that dream is is up to them and they are likely to be drawn to bloggers who they feel share aspects of that dream.”
Bloggers such as Tavi. If the Sartorialist is the blog pioneer and Bryanboy the lovable eccentric, then Tavi is the phenomenon. Her blog, launched just last year, has already attracted fashion industry fans such as Marc Jacobs, Dasha Zhukova and Katie Grand, editor of Love magazine, who, one suspects, are mainly fascinated by how a girl of 13 can know so much about fashion. She has also collaborated with Damien Hirst to produce the cover of Zhukova’s cult British style magazine Pop (she wore four separate outfits for four separate covers).
Log on to The New Girl in Town and, beneath a portrait of Tavi with a huge pink bow tied on top of her head, is the following message: “Tiny 13-year-old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats. Scatters black petals on Rei Kawakubo’s doorsteps and serenades her in rap. I have nowhere near 4 million readers. Rather cynical and cute as a drained rat. In a sewer.”
According to Zhukova, “[Tavi’s] blog is insightful, interesting and the perfect example of a young girl using technology to expand her world and then using it to expand ours.”
Whether or not you agree with this statement, what’s true is that not very long ago it would have been hard to imagine Tavi – and her fellow bloggers – getting anywhere near the world’s leading fashion shows. And once technology is able to attribute a sale directly to a mention on a blog – and it is in development already – the next question for the luxury brands to consider is: how will fashion’s front row look then?
Nicola Copping is the FT’s deputy fashion editor
The FT guide to Christmas gifts
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An expert’s guide to the best fashion blogs
Six stand-out style blogs by Harriet Quick
The Cut New York Magazine’s blog carries the weekly publication’s insightful, playful tone and covers anything from the fad for Blake Lively’s hairstyle (the new Rachel) to the style of a shop assistant at Rick Owens’ New York store, news of layoffs at Zac Posen
and a studded overcoat from Target for an urban pooch.
Threadbanger A US site devoted to DIY couture, inspiring you to “scarf your skirt” (turn a headscarf into an “awesome skirt”), knit a crochet blanket, or all manner of other inventive ideas. Particularly great are the videos in which convivial presenters walk you through some awful suburban thrift shop to find treasures to transform on your sewing machine. The site combines traditional housemaker values with a dose of punk.
A Continuous Lean According to the site’s introductory page, “A Continuous Lean is about things. American things, good-looking things, well-designed things and all sorts of other things.”
Set up by Michael Williams from Ohio, it features design, landscapes and even strands as peculiar as the history of cherry soda.
Fashion is Spinach Named after the 1938 book by Elizabeth Hawes, Ms Spinach is a professional blogger for the Washington Post but her own site is full of light-hearted glimpses into the fashion world, from the collection of an new designer to a snap of US Vogue‘s Sally Singer, lying on her sofa. Mixes a friendly tone with semi-insider culture.
Disney Roller Girl Cute London Girl About Town who mixes news, comment and trend peepshows. Readers get to share her day, be it previewing Burberry’s ‘Art of the Trench’ exhibition or mulling over the “boyfriend shirt” trend.
Face Hunter Face Hunter is a Swiss-born, mainly London-based version of Schuman’s Sartorialist, posting cool-looking types and analysing their style. Garance Doré does the same from Paris.
Harriet Quick is fashion features director of UK Vogue magazine
