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In this essay, Lasica explores how blogs have started to inform traditional media sources and states his belief that this trend will continue into the future. He praises blogs’ unmediated quality, arguing that it is their raw, impressionistic tone that sets them apart from the “lifeless, sterile and homogenized” throng of mass-media produced news. While the lack of any sort of formal editing can sometimes result in blog posts that are poorly thought-out or highly biased, it can also result in the documentation of unusual news nuggets ignored by the mass media.
Lasica then considers perspectives from three influential bloggers: Dan Gillmor (a Mercury News reporter who was among the first to start a personal blog), Doc Searls (senior editor of Linux Magazine and owner of a blog examining marketplace trends) and David Winer (owner of Scripting News, a business and technology blog started back in 1995). Gillmor praises blogs for allowing user interaction and notes that he utilizes his blog to gain feedback on stories he’s working on for the Mercury News. Searls argues that blogs provide a way to connect journalists to “other journalists’ journals”, as well as to experts working within a particular field. Because a blog’s popularity is directly based on reader trust and incoming links, he argues that blogs grant readers greater choice in determining where they turn for news. As a result, many blog authors have become increasingly professional and authoritative on the subjects of their blogs. Winer advocates a new sort of personal journalism, unmediated by newspapers or magazines. He stresses individual interests and passions and argues that indulging these passions results in a proliferation of interesting and unique news stories.
A journalist and blogger himself, it is no surprise that Lasica examines blogs from a journalistic perspective. Yet while he paints a clear picture of blogs’ influence on journalism, Lasica fails to discuss how blogs might impact other readers, such as random visitors or industry insiders who turn to blogs for information on readers’ opinions and new trends. How does audience reception affect the production of posts?
Although Lasica mainly considers “news blogs” (a loosely defined category encompassing all types of niche news), many of his conclusions hold true for fashion blogs as well. For example, many fashion blogs epitomize the raw tone of news blogs and capture unusual trends not featured in traditional media. Furthermore, in a rapidly growing blogosphere, fashion blogs are usually remarkably well connected, with a series of links to other blogs on almost every front page. Most of these blogs are created and maintained by people outside the industry, whose passion for fashion results in a unique, organic perspective.
tagged blogs journalism mass_media by katiej ...and 2 other people ...on 13-MAR-07
In this short piece, reporter Bruno Navarro interviews Scott Schuman, creator of The Sartorialist, a popular New York City-based fashion blog with an aesthetic that generally centers on classically dressed adults. Schuman speaks briefly of his interest in fashion, generated as a young boy reading GQ and furthered during his career as a showroom manager at Valentino (which ended when he decided to become a stay-at-home dad). Unlikely many other bloggers, Schuman knows nothing of journalism – a fact which Navarro praises, arguing that it is The Sartorialist’s simple style and positive tone that have led to its immeasurable success. Furthermore, unlike the proliferation of blogs whose witty, catty tone takes a stab at some of fashion’s biggest names, Schuman provides little text, and generally lets the photos speak for themselves, choosing only to add text when he wants to point out a specific detail, like a hemline or collar. Schuman’s work makes evident his great knowledge and love of fashion, and has gained him jobs taking photographs for Esquire Magazine and Style.com.
Although The Sartorialist is an extremely popular fashion blog (Technorati ranks it number 361 in the worldwide blogosphere, as of March 7, 2007), Navarro downplays Schuman’s power as a foreseer of the cool. Instead, Schuman emphasize personal details of Schuman’s life (he grew up in Indiana and recently left the industry to become a stay-at-home dad) and notes that he has no journalism experience and rejects the catty critiques favored by many other fashion insiders, thus painting him instead as a regular guy whose photos speak to the greater public. The underlying message seems almost a reiteration of the Great American Dream, in which the Internet provides the new means for achieving bigshot status in whatever industry you choose, as long as you’re sincere and love your art.
Clearly, Navarro is a bit overly optimistic. First of all, anyone who has ever visited The Sartorialist will tell you right away that Schuman isn’t just an ordinary guy. He has a keen eye for high fashion and tends to photograph people wearing outfits that cost upwards of $1,000. Second, his discussion of colors and details is complete and impressive, as he points out features of a particular outfit that would go unnoticed to the untrained eye. Navarro also downplays the fact that Schuman worked for Valentino, one of the premier Italian designers in haute culture – and a fact which posits Schuman as more of a fashion insider than a regular guy. Furthermore, while Navarro’s celebrates Schuman’s success as a success of the every man, he fails to mention the almost 300,000 blog posts tagged as “fashion” on Technorati, which do not receive nearly the number of pageviews as The Sartorialist and have not led to such opportunities.
Yet overall, the thrust of Navarro’s article seems right on – the world of fashion blogging clearly does allow for people outside the fashion industry to comment on and influence what is popular – and in that respect, Schuman should act as role model for all aspiring fashion bloggers.
tagged blogs democracy fashion sartorialist by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
Here, Riekert adopts Gladwell’s term to refer to street-style fashion bloggers whose keen sense of fashion results in documentation of the some of globe’s newest and funkiest looks featured on the web for all to see. As a result, fashion industry executives, rather than hiring street teams to seek out “cool” looks, are turning to fashion bloggers in order to ascertain what is in style. This occurrence is widespread and Riekert identifies several companies whose soul purpose is to sift through fashion blogs in the hope of determining the next big thing.
Riekert argues that while these blogs provide a valuable service to the fashion industry, they also democratize the act of coolhunting. “In the end, the price the companies pay for this 'free' information is that they don't have exclusivity,” she explains. Yet coolhunting does not just apply to the fashion industry; indeed, corporations focused on almost any aspect of culture or technology frequently turn to blogs in order to ascertain what the next big trend will be. Like Gladwell’s version of coolhunting, online coolhunting is valuable because it provides up-to-date and cutting-edge information. Furthermore, the interactivity of blogs helps generate further dialogue, as readers comment on posts and debate trends. In the end, ideas debated and favored on the web can be translated into real products created by the industries for the marketplace.
In general, Riekert combines interviews with bloggers and media companies and web statistics to form a solid argument, yet her adoption of the term “coolhunter” to refer to fashion bloggers seems to deviate slightly from Gladwell’s original designation. Unlike the coolhunters of the 1990s, today’s coolhunters are not tied to industry insiders but work for themselves. Rather than reporting their finders directly to a fashion corporation, they post their findings online. Thus, fashion industry experts must go through an extra step in order to access the information that the coolhunters have amassed. This extra step is crucial because it grants both industry insiders and the general public the same information at the same time. Thus, readers are providing feedback in the form of comments and discussion at the same time the fashion industries are designing their new lines. The result is a line of fashion directly influenced by popular opinion.
Yet while many fashions captured by fashion bloggers end up being adapted by the masses, just as many of these fashions are ridiculed or rejected. Although Riekert never explicitly states that fashion blogs make the so-called “cool” subjects featured on blogs susceptible to the (sometimes cruel) opinions of the greater blog-reading public, she ends her article with the mention of a German blogger whose blog features tee-shirts with faux underarm hair – a trend which will likely (or at least hopefully) be rejected by the masses. Extrapolating, one can glean that this more accessible form of coolhunting also strips the cool of some of their power to dictate the fashions, as any new trends must be approved by the masses before they are translated into profitable market goods.
tagged blogs capitalism cool-hunting democracy fashion by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
In this article, Zamiatin explores why fashion blogs have attracted so many readers in the past few months. She attributes their growing popularity to two major factors: a sense of immediacy (blogs respond to what is happening currently, and provide updates more frequently than magazines, which are generally issued once a month) and a candid, often humorous writing style not found in fashion magazines. She briefly discusses the recent efforts among fashion bloggers, such as the editors of Coutorture, an online fashion blogging community, to bring together all fashion blogs in one place where users can find them all quickly and easily. Such a community would help democratize fashion by allowing for a multiplicity of voices and allowing readers to leave feedback.
Zamiatin comments that some of the more popular fashion blogs concern themselves with celebrity fashion, thus treading on ground traditionally covered by the mainstream fashion press. However, Zamiatin does not think that fashion blogs will eclipse traditional media such as magazines – instead, will they supplement mainstream media by providing new, current information for fans to consume and discuss.
Zamiatin’s discussion of immediacy and style as two distinguishing features of fashion blogs can be widened to describe much user-generated content created in today’s participatory internet culture: YouTube videos are known for their quick stream-times and often satiric content while web comics such as Achewood or Toothpaste for Dinner are updated daily and offer ridiculous, humorous content. A fashion blog community, such as Coutorture or ShareYourLook.com (see entry) would act as a sort of YouTube for the fashion industry, allowing the best blogs to rise to the top and gain the most pageviews, thus placing fashion even further into the hands of the masses.
Zamiatin is probably correct in arguing that blogs will not displace traditional fashion reporting, but she misses one of the more obvious reasons why this is so: the advantage of an actual (as opposed to virtual) magazine is that you can roll it up, toss it into a backpack and read it in the park or on the beach. While Sidekicks and other devices that allow users to access their email remotely are growing more and more popular, there is something about curling up with a magazine that can not be replicated with a tiny Sidekick screen.
Furthermore, while Zamiatin argues that fashion blogs democratize fashion culture, one could also argue that by focusing on celebrities, many blogs actually reinforce the cultural distance between celebrities and the greater reading public. Instead, it seems more likely that street style blogs, who random stylish strangers, have the potential to democratize fashion by portraying it as something exemplified by ordinary people.
tagged blogs celebrity_culture democracy fashion web_2.0 by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
The memoirs of industry insider Steven Cojocaru, Red Carpet Diaries traces Steven’s rise from a blurb writer for People to the host of the Oscar Review and the Today Show’s fashion correspondent. Cojocaru’s voice is varied and descriptive, shifting quickly from bitingly critical to blissfully in awe, depending on the fashion or fashionista at hand. A no-nonsense, trend-obsessed expert, Cojocaru flippantly throws out the names of top designers and galas, touting each celebrity run-in as just another day in his exciting and dramatic life. Style-conscious from birth, Cojocaru developed an interest in fashion from his mother, an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike, while growing up in Canada. Yet his high style helped him rise to the top, where he spends his free time hanging out with celebrities and providing viscous commentary on what others are wearing.
An artifact arising from popular culture, Cojocaru’s book is aimed at fashion lovers and fans of Cojocaru’s (or Cojo, as he is often called) television segment. The result is the snarky combination of affect and criticism that fans have come to love. In adopting such a voice however, Cojo portrays the fashion world as an exciting exotic place only accessible to a chosen elite. While speaking (ostensibly) to the greater reading public, Cojo still maintains a distance from his readers, as one with superior knowledge and experience. This approach is strikingly different from that adopted by Navarro in his interview with fashion blogger Scott Schuman. Navarro portrays Schuman as a regular guy, comparable to any of his readers, yet Cojocaru asserts earlier on in his book that, “I was ‘different’ from the get-go…I was convinced that I was Princess Grace and Prince Rainier’s love child” (6). Through such choices, Cojocaru chooses to distinguish himself from his readers, rather than relate to them.
Published in 2003, Cojo’s book now seems trite and outdated. As the democratization of blogging allows both fashion insiders and experienced coolhunters to seek out cutting edge news and trends via the blogosphere, “confessional” accounts such as Cojo’s seem self-important and irrelevant. Why read the boastings of an industry insider when you too can become an insider, by browsing the blogs for free from your own home? Cojo’s knowledge is no longer privileged, and as a result, it is less valuable. Surrounded by a world of voices commenting on fashion and celebrities, Cojocaru’s voice blends in with hundreds of others commenting on the same people and trends.
Reviews of Cojo’s book were mixed; posted reader responses on Amazon.com alternate between praising Cojo’s witty style and berating the book as trivial gossip. Even among the star’s fans, it seems that the democratization of fashion blogging has diminished the power of industry insiders such as Cojo, making them appear self-important and boring as a result.
tagged celebrity_culture fashion insider_account by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
This article examines how online fashion bloggers are gaining more and more credibility with industry insiders who are attracted to their large numbers of readers and hope to win them over. As a result, these bloggers are granted advertising deals with major industries and are greeted with open access to fashion shows and events formerly accessible to major media companies only. Top-ranking blogs can also be sold for considerable amounts of money, especially among media companies looking to strike it rich in the world of the elite.
Bloggers also wield considerable power because their snarky, critical comments leave designers fearing an online trashing. Other designers seek out bloggers in the hope of gaining extra publicity. Finally, many designers and media corporations recruit bloggers to come and work for them, hoping that bloggers’ keen sense of style will give their company a coolness boost. Fashion-blogging represents a quickly growing industry, with revenues only expected to rise as online advertising becomes increasingly popular.
A well-researched article, Dodes incorporates comments from several top fashion executives and photo-bloggers with statistics from Technorati (a blog tracker) and BlogAds (an agency responsible for placing advertisements on top-raking blogs.) While the article uses the data to draw reasonable conclusions, it neglects to consider differences between blogs that cover street style versus those that cover couture or celebrity styles. Although Dodes’s failure to differentiate between different types of blogs makes the article appear as it if speaks for them all, when analyzed closely, Dodes seems to focus only on the latter two types. Thus, while she draws a connection between fashion bloggers whose posts about couture and celebrity style may gain them insider status, she does not mention street-style bloggers and never suggests that the writers of such blogs might have a different relationship with the fashion industry.
Nevertheless, the implications of this article are enormous. First of all, Dodes credits fashion bloggers with making the secrets of the fashion world available to anyone who cares to seek them out via the internet. It also posits fashion bloggers as independent and increasingly powerful experts, almost akin to a ruling aristocracy, who are not tied to any one company or designer, but who can praise or criticize different labels as they see fit, and who have commanded the attention of both media companies and fashion industry bigwigs. Finally, Dodes posits a capitalist superstructure (not surprising for WSJ) which maintains that control ultimately lies with whoever influences the masses, and that bloggers succeed because they are more in touch with reading audiences (and thus more likely to influence their liking of a particular item or design) than the industries themselves.
tagged blogs capitalism democracy fashion by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
This now famous article by Malcolm Gladwell is known for first coining the term “cool-hunters” to refer to fashion industry detectives who scour the streets for new trends, as seen on cutting-edge urban hipsters. Gladwell also notes that the 1990s marked a new era, in which what was cool was no longer determined by couture houses, but by elusive street hipsters whose style changed whenever the fashion industries began to introduce similar styles into their newest lines. The result was a new type of participatory culture – where style was controlled by “cool” people outside of the corporation, whose privileged social knowledge still granted them power as an elite group, even though they were spread across the globe and had no formal connections to the industry.
Yet as the fashion industry became better and better at copying trends it observed on the street, those on the cutting edge became more and more elusive, because “the act of discovering cool is what causes cool to move on.” Thus, Gladwell posits fashion as a bottom-up process which incorporates trends and ideas developed by different groups throughout the world. He characterizes the fashion crowd as existing in five groups: innovators, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and laggards. Coolhunters seek out the innovators in the hopes of being the first to feature a trend, as such success would boost their company’s image and sales. Seeking out innovators is easier than searching for innovative items, since trends change so quickly.
Gladwell constructs his argument based on interviews with cool-hunters, as well as his own experiences traveling with cool-hunters “on the hunt”. He adopts the persona of a knowledgeable fly-on-the-wall, providing insightful commentary of all he recounts. Gladwell’s believability is evident through the lasting adaptation of the term “cool-hunter”, as well as the article’s frequent use in the classroom setting (such as “Media and Popular Culture”, a class at the Annenberg School of Communication). While Gladwell was among the first to describe fashion in this way, his ideas are firmly rooted in postmodernism. The world of fashion, constructed from the opinions and ideas of cool folk from around the world and reassembled by the fashion industry for mass market appeal, epitomizes a highly regarded aesthetic innovation ultimately driven by capitalism. At the same time, the world Gladwell describes is poised on the brink of a postmodern capitalist economy and the new (post-postmodern?) blogosphere. If the fashion industry in 1997 (the time of this article’s publication) was driven by an elusive cool crowd whose styles were forever changing, the democracy of blogging tools ten years later has demystified this crowd, capturing and detailing their style through photographs featured on fashion blogs accessible to all.
tagged cool-hunting culture identity trickle_down by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
One could argue that is almost impossible to attempt to understand the complex relationship between fashion bloggers and the fashion industry without an understanding of postmodernism. Frederic Jameson posits commoditization at the base of a postmodern culture, arguing that aesthetic and cultural production has become integrated into commodity production generally. The need for profits drives corporations to bombard the market with new products for eager consumers, yet in order to develop new products, there is a constant need for new ideas that will translate into marketable goods. Thus, Jameson grants “aesthetic innovation” an important structural role in driving the market.
This aesthetic innovation, however, takes on new forms in the late capitalist society. While the complex, amorphous nature of postmodern culture makes it difficult to define, Jameson is able to identify several key (if often contradictory!) characteristics of postmodern aesthetic innovation, including a focus on pastiche, nostalgia, schizophrenia, euphoria, ahistoricism, fragmentation and camp. He also argues that because economic motives drive the creation of culture, as well as that of political, social and commercial discourse, postmodernism witnesses a melding of all of these discourses into one. Thus, while postmodern is on one hand increasingly fragmented and diverse, its complete commoditization closely aligns it with the creation of the social and political sphere.
If we apply Jameson’s theory of cultural creation to the world of fashion, we encounter a society in which fashion arises from a population whose fragmented, yet global world view results in styles that are part kitschy, part retro and influenced by international as well as local trends. Jameson might very well be describing the large varieties of looks that one finds on Face Hunter (a popular Paris-based fashion blog). A furthering of his theory would put forth these looks as a type of highly valued aesthetic innovation, which would then be adopted by the fashion industries in order to produce marketable goods. Jameson’s theory seems to accurately describe the relationship between the trendsetters (Gladwell’s innovators) and the fashion industries, yet leaves the relationship between the fashion industries and the masses unclear. Always and ultimately a Marxist, Jameson grants the masses little control over cultural creation, arguing that they are tools of the capitalist machine. However, in a world where the variety of choices means that the masses can select freely among different fashions, the masses seem to have more agency that the industries, who must invest time and energy in hoping to capture a mass audience. Jameson’s granting of cultural discourse a spot among social and political discourse however appears to hold true with regards to fashion; a tie-dyed shirt and love beads conveys political messages, just as a designer suit and expensive handbag convey social and economic ones.
tagged capitalism culture postmodernism by katiej ...and 1 other person ...on 13-MAR-07
A sociologist writing in the 1990s, Davis explores how trends are determined. He posits fashion as a cycle, in which popular trends fade into oblivion, only to be resuscitated later. However, this cycle has grown short and fragmented as multiple trends gain popularity at the same time and new trends come into and fade from popularity with increasing speed. Davis seeks to determine what causes the fashion cycle to shift by examining different theories. The first of these theories is the trickle-down theory, which posits creation in the hands of the upper classes. Their styles are eventually copied by the lower classes, and as they are replicated, they no longer become fashionable. Davis criticizes this theory for focusing only on class, arguing instead that fashion is a complex form of personal expression that can reveal one’s age, gender, sexual identity, political leanings, leisure inclinations, religious beliefs and more. Davis also points out that while sociology provides a lens for examining how fashion cycles, it fails to account for what the cycle means.
Instead, Davis favors Blumer’s theory of collective selection, in which fashion is driven by tastes and perpetuated by the need to be fashionable. Taste accounts for fashions rising in both small groups and across the mainstream and is influenced by shared life experiences and common interaction. For Blumer, fashion is tied to “modernism”, which he defines as “restlessness, an openness to new experience and fascination with the new.” Finally, he argues that fashion’s quickly cycling trends serves a useful societal function, in ordering the styles of the present, detaching current trends from outdated ones and preparing the populace for future trends. While this theory seems to represent fashion cycles more accurately than the class-ist model, it too fails to provide a methodology for interpreting the meanings behind various fashion statements. Davis worries that both theories are abstract and outdated, shedding little insight into the complex world of fashion and failing to account for the influence and force of the fashion industries.
Davis’s unease with available theories of fashion cycling point to the size and complexity of forces driving what becomes stylish -- forces which have grown even more complex with the advent of fashion blogs. While theories of trickle-down fashion and collective selection seem problematic even to Davis, they still provide two useful, if incomplete, methods for thinking about fashion in the 21 Century. Trickle-down theory and collective selection represent two ends of the spectrum in which one seeks to understand fashion – in the former, fashion is imposed on the populace from above and they have little or no say control over it, and in the latter, fashion is a bottom up process developed by the masses in response to shared experiences. The privileged fashion elite of the trickle-down theory sound remarkably like Gladwell’s innovators, and the trickle-down effect seems to perfectly describe Gladwell’s adoption of trends. While Gladwell’s theory is based on privileged social knowledge as opposed to class, both theories employ similar mechanisms.
Moreover, Blumer’s model of collective selection seems a precursor to Riekert’s fashion model, in which styles favored by online readers are then translated into market goods. Both posit societal taste as the driving force behind fashion, granting the people agency in determining what becomes popular. Yet while Blumer’s model presents taste as organic, arising from life experience, Riekert portrays taste as the ability to adopt or reject options presented by bloggers and by the trendsetters themselves.
tagged culture democracy fashion identity trickle_down by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
The Hot or Not of the fashion blogosphere, ShareYourLook allows users to upload photos of themselves in their favorite outfits and then asks other users to rate their style on a scale of 1 to 5. The site also contains a slew of web 2.0 features that savvy Internet users have undoubtedly become accustomed with – users can email photos, comment on them, tag them or filter them based on style or price. In addition, each user has a homepage, which includes recent fashion photos and personal information. Fun features, such as “The Wall” will randomly generate 20 photos posted on the site, and a “News” page contains links to a variety of blogs sorted into categories: fashion, shopping, celebrities, beauty.
ShareYourLook is an important development for the online fashion community because it allows anyone with a camera and an internet connection to partake in the creating and judging of fashion trends. While street style blogs capture ordinary fashionable people, ShareYourLook contains photos from people across the globe, many of whom may live in areas where fashion bloggers never venture or whose simple styles are unlikely to catch the eye of bloggers seeking unusual, cutting-edge trends. ShareYourLook is unique in that it features ordinary everyday looks alongside more cutting edge looks, and asks users to comment on both. While many of the top-rated looks feature trendy, “high style” items, common items are highly ranked as well, such as skinny jeans and black rain boots. By placing new and unusual items alongside already popular favorites, ShareYourLook’s top-rated looks represent a more accurate compilation of what fashion fans actually find stylish, drawn from a larger pool of varying styles. Like YouTube, the top rated looks on ShareYourLook are those that have received high ratings from multiple users; thus, like YouTube, ShareYourLook provides the tools for a truly democratic fashion culture.
Yet while ShareYourLook provides the tools for fashion democratization, as of now, it does not have enough users to truly represent anything other than the opinions of site-users. While the main page boasts that the site has users in 54 countries, numbers still seem low: the most-viewed look only has 1398 views, as of 11:10 p.m. on March 7, 2007, compared to the top video on YouTube, which has 43,546,227 views as of the same time. Technorati only lists three incoming links to the site, making it relatively insubstantial in the current world of fashion blogging. Even so, ShareYourLook could be the future of fashion blogging – thus democratizing the tools of culture even more.
tagged democracy fashion web_2.0 by katiej ...on 13-MAR-07
