The British Fashion Council has been doing innovative things for Fashion Week for the past few years, including installing those Vodafone phone chargers on the front row, live streaming most of the shows and initiating numerous consumer-focussed Fashion Week projects (have you seen the Oxford Street flags?).
I’m happy to be part of the latest one, a relaunch of the BFC blog portal and a brand new bloggers panel. (more…)
What do you get when you gather a handful of fashion and beauty bloggers and editors around the chef’s table at The Gilbert Scott brasserie, accompanied by gin cocktails and a different wine with every course? A long and rather merry debate is the answer.
Three weeks ago, I hosted an evening at ‘the kitchen table’ of The Gilbert Scott, part of the wonderfully gothic St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in King’s Cross. Renovated in 2011 from George Gilbert Scott’s original Midland Grand Hotel, it’s one of London’s most dramatic landmarks. (more…)
Fashion Month seems to have reached an interesting sweet spot of industry and consumer focus. The public has proved just how much it loves to be part of the LFW experience – not just watching the live streams, but actively commenting, sharing and shopping. This we know, but I felt it more keenly than ever this season, due to bigger efforts made to share via technology (hello Topshop ‘be the buyer’ app, Burberry Beauty Booth and Matthew Williamson Vine videos). (more…)
Well who’d have thunk it? Six years ago today, I started a fashion blog. This very one, in fact, albeit on a Blogspot platform with a slightly clunky white-text-on-black-background layout. If you scroll back far enough, you can see my early posts; embarrassing though they are, I’ve not deleted them as it’s good to remember the journey.
My six year anniversary coincides with a pithy New York Times T Magazine story by Suzy Menkes lamenting the blog mob and the changes in fashion media and critiquing. Do read it, it’s certainly thought provoking. Alas, Menkes does come across as slightly jaded in her disapproval. Flagging up the common practice of ‘bloggers’ (read: the Fashion Week style blogger elite) who get photographed in next season’s looks, often gifted by designers in exchange for coverage, she reminds us that real reporters don’t play the gifting game (or ‘bribery’ as she puts it). It’s a funny one I admit. On the one hand, why not help give young designers exposure by wearing their clothes, if it will give them a leg-up and boost your visual presence as well? On the other hand, when the pre- and post-show peacocking starts to get more attention than the shows themselves, then that clearly signals a change in how things are working. Is it dumbing down though? or is it just an evolution in how fashion is seen and consumed now?
Six years ago, no-one even considered any of this stuff. As a phenomenon, it simply didn’t exist yet. Instagram didn’t exist, Vine didn’t exist, Twitter was in its infancy and Anna Dello Russo was just another jobbing fashion editor. How would fashion have weathered the recessions were it not for fashion blogs, Fashion Week street style and the powerful role they played in opening up the fashion industry to the masses? More pertinent still; where will fashion, blogging and the street style strutters be in another six years time? I guess that’s for us to witness, while documenting the process…
Thanks for the last six years of support!
Image: Stefania Yarhi/Textstyles – NYT
