Karl Lagerfeld, Anna Wintour, and the Similarly Immortal Concept of Blogging

Jeff Carvalho, the Editor of the fashion website Selectism once wrote in an essay:

'I often receive emails from young writers and bloggers asking for tips and advice on how to expose their blogs in today's world.  I tend to respond with a flippant 'don't bother', but not without explaining to them that the platform and conversation has moved…While the readerships on Highsnobiety and Selectism remain strong, today’s world has moved to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.’

But has it? It should have. The advent of social media in the 21^st century and the subsequent explosion of the sites we are all familiar with today were viewed as being able to accommodate the topics catered for by the blogs of old, and rightly so. Whether you’re interested in fashion or food, a medium such as Instagram delivers it in a much easier, more fluid, and more aesthetically pleasing format than any blog could.

Why is it then, that so many of my friends are starting fashion blogs, and not Instagram accounts? Moreover, why are we starting a blog despite being present on pretty much all relevant social media? 

Those of us born in the late 80s to the mid-90s were brought up on blogging. For myself, my fashion interest was sparked by the #menswear craze of the mid to late 2000s (thankfully those days are far, far behind us). Indeed, I know lots of people whose interest in fashion was sparked by a blogger, having been inspired by their take on fashion. Of course, I could happily have sat back and lazily digested an endless feed of ‘inspiration’ from Facebook and Instagram, but as someone who would go on to pay (an extortionate) £27,000 for the privilege of education, I’d rather fucking learn something.

Naturally, then, blogs and fashion forums were attractive to me.  Lawrence Schlossman’s extremely popular tumblr blog How to Talk to Girls at Parties was a good starting point, and everything blossomed from there into myriad corners of the world of clothing. This afforded me the opportunity to look at clothes without feeling like I was wasting my time, as I was learning about clothes at an alarming rate. And this felt right.

Now, of course, I do understand that social media presents an entirely new form of interaction with the fashion world.  Images are a hell of a lot easier to digest than sentences, and I’m sure that I’m not alone in lapsing back into this less strenuous form of consumption. If I’m waiting in between classes, I’m far more inclined to check the Instagram feed of Les Freres Joachim than I am to read the latest article of Colin McDowell. There’s a lot less effort in double-tapping a photo than there is in reading a paragraph, and everyone is cognizant of that, myself included.

Blogging is still just so superior to us though. We won’t stop at a mere Instagram account, because we know that people truly interested in fashion are desirous of more than that. However, a fashion blog bereft of astute analysis of collections and acerbic opinions entwined with a degree of knowledge that the blogger cultivates with you frankly isn’t worth your time. Nobody gains anything from reading someone’s shit post about Dries Van Noten’s AW15 show if they’re not giving their opinion on it, or at least giving any information beyond what one can see on the screen. God knows, I’m far too lazy to form my own opinions on a show if nobody is asking me what I think.  Blogging as a culture has survived, but in order for it to thrive, bloggers need to raise their game and cut the otiosity. 

‘If you wanted to present a point of view, it wasn’t just a visual point of view. You had to write something, you had to publish stuff’ reminisces Sean Hotchkiss, the editorial director of Suitsupply. He reflects on an era that I hanker for, an era in which posting entire galleries of Paris Fashion Week shows like hot cakes simply wasn’t enough to get them page views. Blogging hasn't died off because we still need it, and it will continue to prosper as long as people take a genuine interest in fashion.

Christian Robinson