On NYFW and First Hand Writing.

February 8, 2010, filed under Fashion 2.0, Social Media; Comments.
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I wanted to pen a smart post this weekend, on the upcoming NY Fashion Week, social media and all the frenzy. But it didn’t come to me in a form of a cohesive post, so I decided to let it cook for a bit longer. Meanwhile I tweeted about my #writersblock (because when you have one, the only thing that’s left is tweet), and magically Twitterverse responded with an answer I’ve been looking for. “WRITE WHAT YOU SAW FIRST HAND AND LIVED THROUGH IT…” wrote me @stevemarino and it couldn’t be more appropriate answer to the dilemma of NYFW coverage I’ve been thinking about lately.

In my 6th season at the tents, chasing for the latest fashion scoop, I can’t help but wonder what’s the purpose. With a risk of sounding like a grandma, I will tell you that when I started covering NYFW, I was many times one of the first online to post reviews of the shows from my laptop sitting at the Bryant Park, sometimes 30 min after the models left the runway.

Today this type of coverage will disappear in the sea of blog posts, some written based on the live streamed video of the shows. And I promise they will have a better view sitting in front of their computers and zooming on all the details. And if not - there will be high res photos from the show posted shortly after. Based on these materials anyone can write a story, or review, just like they were at the show.

So what’s the point of running around this city in 4 inch heels, dealing with the attitude of PR and security at the tents, standing in lines sometimes to be turned away because the show was overbooked, all this only to get a glimpse of the 5 minutes runway action from behind people’s backs?

Then the clothes we see are not even relevant yet, because no one will be able to wear them until next October. It feels forever. So what’s the point? To mentally prepare people to asymmetric dresses coming up this fall to their local mall?

The only thing that’s left is to “WRITE WHAT YOU SAW FIRST HAND AND LIVED THROUGH IT”, even if you saw it from behind other people’s backs, I would add…

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the rush of fashion week, the excitement of the dimming lights right before the runway begins, the surprise element of each collection, the game of spotting the next “It” girl on the runway, the hair spray madness backstage, the tired and happy faces of designers right after the show is over and the chic conversations at the VIP lounges - fashion week is more than just clothes, and let’s be honest, many times what happens around the clothes has more potential for a good story.

This season I will be capturing the experience itself, rather than just the fabrics and the silhouettes. Partially because you don’t need me to explain what you see in the photos, and partially because I’m simply tired of words like “feminine shapes”, “edgy looks”, “flowing fabrics”, “intriquette details”, “designed for a confident woman”. Does anyone design for non-confident women these days, really? I’m refusing to deliver the “proper” show review, and will be focusing on blogging my own experience the way I live it. Why? Because I have the freedom to do so. Without editors and publishers dictating the rules - that’s what blogging is all about.

What will you be blogging about this fashion week season?


p.s. Follow our #NYFW coverage on Twitter, My It Things, various video channels, and on StyleCoalition.com/InsideTheTents.

10 Fashion Blogger Stereotypes, Or Why Brands Still Fear Working With Bloggers.

January 25, 2010, filed under Fashion 2.0, Social Media; Comments.
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One of the things I find lots of pleasure in is shattering stereotypes, in life generally and in my current incarnation as a fashion blogger. Besides stereotypes I’ve witnessed while encountering with designers and PR people , I recently noticed a certain pattern that keeps coming across in the press. It started few years ago when fashion bloggers began covering New York fashion week, continued with the FTC and blogging ethics buzz last year, and most recently came to a climax with the coverage of the growing influence of fashion bloggers in the mainstream press.

All these mentions created some sort of a portrait, that many of the industry people have in their minds when they think about fashion bloggers. I feel this portrait shows one very narrow point of view, while the reality as many of us know it, is much more diverse. Living in NYC and being lucky to know personally a pretty large number of bloggers I noticed all of us come to blogging from different backgrounds, for different reasons and while we do share one similar passion, the way we live it varies from one to another.

While blogging is evolving as a business and profession for many of us, I think it’s important to recognize the differences between various groups of individuals in the fashion blogging landscape and avoid the very comfortable stereotyped thinking, especially if your job is to create and manage online media relationships for a designer or brand.

Here are the 10 most common stereotyped statements about fashion bloggers could be found:

  1. Fashion bloggers are teenagers or people in their 20s. From some reason most of the bloggers that get press attention these days are pretty young - from 13 years old Tavi to 18 year old Jane Aldridge - these are the names we keep seeing in the mainstream press, but the truth is there are many bloggers in their 30s and 40s who rarely get the spotlight.
  2. Fashion bloggers are skinny, tall and picture perfect. It might seem to the outsider that most successful bloggers are models who never made it. They are pretty enough to post their own editorial style photos, they are skinny, and sometimes even model-esque tall. One look at the homepage of sites like Weardrobe or Chicktopia is enough to get an idea of the stereotype. The fact is we all come in different shapes and sizes, and that’s why I applaud my friends like StyleIT, who recently started posting her daily looks in a special column called On The Plus Side.
  3. Fashion bloggers are loud and eccentric. Some of the fashion bloggers do have loud and “out there” personalities, but many are also strictly business people, with backgrounds in everything from marketing to finance.
  4. Fashion bloggers are ego driven and attention seeking. Not every fashion blogger is a subject of their own posts. Most of us actually invest lots of energy in covering the industry, designers, trends and everything that’s happening outside our own persona. We do it because of sincere interest in the industry, we spend our own time and money covering events, researching subjects and looking for inspiration, just like reporters do.
  5. Read the rest of this entry »

The Future Of Fashion: Seasons Are So Last Season.

January 17, 2010, filed under Fashion 2.0, Technology, e-commerce; Comments.
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The fashion industry is going through restructure, just like the music industry did few years ago. As fashion brands become more digital, it gets harder for the old rules to work. Collections, seasons, fashion weeks, buyers, magazine editors - everything and everyone are challenged these days, and inevitably many processes will be redefined, and many positions will lose their power. Despite the threat on the traditional industry establishments (magazines, department stores),  I think the restructure is a healthy thing and eventually will lead to enhanced productivity, which in turn will leave fashion brands and houses with more time and resources to innovate. Here is what will need to happen in order to allow that.

No more seasons. The chase after Spring, Fall, Resort and Pre-Fall seasons is pointless when you have chains like H&M and Target coming up with collections every week or so. Many of them cross the lines between winter and summer, and their pieces could be mixed and matched. Examples: Jimmy Choo for H&M, Rodarte and Zac Posen for Target - all included dresses that could be worn both during summer and winter, not to mention open sandals sold by H&M in December… Dividing collections by seasons might not make much sense in this fast paced environment. Although the way we dress is still influenced by the weather outside, it doesn’t mean designers have to introduce them all at the same time, twice a year during their regional fashion week.

No more full collections. Most fashion collections are consisting from basics, which don’t change much from season to season, and trendy staple pieces, which change according to seasonal trends. It’s not very efficient to start every season from scratch, creating basics and staple pieces. Sportswear companies are a great example to a more effective approach: take Adidas which has the same basic sneakers available from year to year, and releases special limited edition, themed sneakers few times a year. Designers could adopt similar approach and keep their best selling basics from season to season, and this way save on production. This will also allow them to focus all their energy on the most creative items, which truly express who they are. In addition, just like people stopped buying music albums and instead now purchase individual songs on iTunes, consumers today are not necessarily shopping for the entire look, but rather are looking for that one special piece to add to their wardrobe. Therefore designers should be focusing on creating best selling pieces which can stand out on their own, instead of worrying about making a cohesive seasonal collection which will please fashion writers. Online retailers like Net-A-Porter already are experimenting in this direction of smaller item-focused collections, by inviting designers like Roland Mouret, who launched six limited-edition mini dresses with the e-tailer last December.

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Fashion Week and Social Media: 10 Ideas For Grabs.

January 12, 2010, filed under Fashion 2.0, Social Media; Comments.
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If you are a PR or marketing strategist working with a fashion brand or design house, you must be under pressure these days to deliver the most innovative ideas incorporating social media into the busy fashion weeks season. Not just innovative, but something that can top last season’s front row laptops at D&G and the multi-cameras live streaming at McQueen. If you still don’t have that one big idea that will take your brand from Fashion 1.0 to 2.0, I have a few that could make just as much buzz, if executed well, even without a generous sponsorship from Apple. Feel free to adopt, as I most likely won’t find any use to them (my days at the creative agency are far behind), and most of them will be out of fashion next season. As much as some sound unrealistic, I would love to see them actually come to life, in some way.

Idea #1. Live stream the makeup room! Lots of designers live streamed their runway shows for their fans, but none live streamed behind the scenes of the craziness that goes into preparing the show. Anyone who has been backstage before the show knows that most interesting things happen there, when hundreds of people are working together to put on a 5 min show. A camera in the makeup room would get so much more views than any runway.

Idea #2. Let the models tweet! Again, if you’ve ever seen models backstage before the show, you must know that these creatures spend majority of their time texting or doing some other stuff on their phones. Why waste the opportunity on silly messages, when they can live tweet from the backstage of your show! Many models use Twitter these days, and encouraging them (or actually allowing them) to tweet anything they want can create lots of buzz on its own.

Idea #3. Make hashtag your fashion trend! I’m pretty sure 2010 will mark the year hashtags became trendy, just like accessories. These days it’s even appropriate to use them in official invites, right next to the dress code. So there is no reason you can’t create your own hashtag for the runway show or presentation and include it on the invite. That way guests will start tweeting about your brand right after receiving the invite, and connect with each other.

Idea #4: Open a countdown blog! Although we know designers keep their collections a secret before the shows, these days it’s all about the pre-show buzz. Give fans a tiny sneak peek of the fabric, the silhouette or a sketch - and you created excitement. Give them one every day for the 30 days before the show - and you created a real press frenzy! The cost of opening a blog is zero and you will actually save money and resources by not pitching the sneak peek to all bloggers, but publishing it yourself.

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Curating The Web: Why Anna Wintour Is Bigger Than Google.

January 1, 2010, filed under Fashion 2.0, Technology; Comments.
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Last week I wrote on the subject of content overload, which sparked conversation among bloggers who find they are also battling the quality vs quantity dilemma. This lead me to another hot subject widely discussed on the web these days – the decreasing relevance of search engines and the increasing importance for web curation. Let’s look at these two trends and explore the opportunity they bring specifically to the fashion media.

Trend #1: The decreasing relevance of search engines in the age of content farms and reproduced content. Google ranking slowly loses its value and trust. As John Battelle points in Searchblog:

The Google ecosystem is failing more - failing to get us what we think we want. Failing to not frustrate us. [...] Now, Google’s ecosystem is ripe for a quick buck - “content farms” that build article pages cheaply to make a quick buck off AdWords. But these articles, at least for a portion of us, don’t really provide the answers we are looking for.

Is it possible that the action itself of Googl-ing content won’t even exist in a few years from now? After all the more content gets produced every year the harder will be the job of finding the right one. Our frustration with not getting the results we want might turn us to seek content in different places, such as authorities on the subject of our interest. Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb also thinks Google should be worried:

Right now ‘quantity’ still rules on the Web, ‘quality’ is hard to find. Perhaps that’s why Reuters is betting on the subscription model - it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. I think there’s something to that, which if true implies that Google will become less relevant in the future.

Trend #2: Web curation will be of the biggest trends (and challenges) of 2010, according to Pete Cashmore of Mashable. As he writes at his column for CNN:

Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields? [...] Journalists, it would seem, are well-placed to capitalize on the trend, since directing an audience’s attention via links is not materially different to editing a newspaper or magazine.

And soon enough consumers will be willing to pay for it. This is something many media outlets are betting on these days, including the WSJ and Rupert Murdoch who declared earlier this year that the era of a free-for-all in online news was over:

Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.

Now let’s sum up these two trends and apply it to the fashion world. Instead of mourning on the rapid decrease of the glossy pages, fashion editors should be focusing on a new medium - curated web. They have the AUTHORITY and EXPERTISE to point to the right sources and answer the questions, and it seems like soon enough people will be willing to pay for this service.

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