BigShinyThing

There’s the snatched inteview with Anna Wintour on Almostgirl’s blog and our favourite-bloggers-in the-world-ever, the Fug girls, reviewing the collections for New York magazine. Now the Wall Street Journal has noticed that bloggers are ‘in’ this season. And it’s all above board (or ‘under the tent’ in WSJ’s parlance). About 40 bloggers have been given press passes by IMG, the company that runs New York Fashion Week, and according to Vice President of IMG Fern Mallis, “it’s an evolving category”.

No kidding. Back in the day [other industries take note] the fashion industry would have repelled all borders against the blog contingent, who hardly engage in the endless advertiser-kowtowing that the glossies have come to be defined by. Now the fashion houses — and in particular the poorer, smaller companies — have woken up to the marketing opportunity that such blogs represent. Plus there’s the simple fact that this year there are 191 shows in New York, up 25% from five years ago, and the mainstream press can’t or won’t cover them all. Julie Fredrickson of Coutorture has a nice interview with Cathy Horyn of the New York Times which explains how the whole ‘bloggers do fashion week’ deal came about.

The fashion houses have also got strategic. Alison Brod, a New York publicist who represents designer Jill Stuart, now has an employee focusing exclusively on blogs, tracking their impact on sales, among other things. Meanwhile a year-old company called Glam Media plans to launch a new fashion blog-ranking system which will use criteria such as ‘most viewed’. ‘most linked to’ and ‘most commented on’ to discern which are the A-list fashion blogs out there.

As always, some people are canny enough to know exactly where their fans are. Jay McCarroll, winner of Bravo’s reality series Project Runway, has invited fan blog BloggingProjectRunway to report on his first fashion week show.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that those pesky bloggers will write anything nice/positive/commercially viable about the shows that they attend. If indeed they write about the clothes at all. No matter. As long as the show (and by association the brand) is being written about at all, Job Done.

Note. Don’t expect to see this happening in Milan/Paris any time soon.

Photo of journalist and blogger banned from the Jeremy Scott show, Patty Huntington, courtesy of her paper, Sydney Morning Herald, via Gawker.