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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.