Are Fashion Bloggers Ruining Fashion Week? Suzy Menkes Thinks So
- Created on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 14:07
- Written by Anna Marevska
If you haven’t read Suzy Menkes’s T Magazine article The Circus of Fashion, then you should now. The fashion veteran ruffled some feathers earlier this month with her claims that fashion bloggers are to blame for the changing nature of Fashion Week and the fuss around the shows, as opposed to what’s going on inside the tents.
“We were once described as “black crows” — us fashion folk gathered outside an abandoned, crumbling downtown building in a uniform of Comme des Garçons or Yohji Yamamoto,” writes Menkes. “Today, the people outside fashion shows are more like peacocks than crows. They pose and preen, in their multipatterned dresses, spidery legs balanced on club-sandwich platform shoes, or in thigh-high boots under sculptured coats blooming with flat flowers.”
She continues, “…You can hardly get up the steps at Lincoln Center, in New York, or walk along the Tuileries Garden path in Paris because of all the photographers snapping at the poseurs. Cameras point as wildly at their prey as those original paparazzi in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” But now subjects are ready and willing to be objects, not so much hunted down by the paparazzi as gagging for their attention.
The question whether bloggers are good or bad for the industry isn't a fair one. And the fact that Menkes implies that fashion bloggers have somehow tainted Fashion Week is ridiculous. Like it or not, fashion week further solidified the social media pehomenon known as the fashion blogger, and brands have been more open than ever to use this new generation of self-made editors. I mean, have you looked at your Instagram feed lately?
Thanks to bloggers, high fashion has become a lot more accessible and brands are certainly recognizing it, hence supporting the blogging community.
Needless to say, the article caused quite the stir and many of the famed bloggers have already expressed their opinions. Here are a few of them:
Leandra Medine: "It doesn't seem quite fair to peg the bloggers that have actually become 'famous' as such just for being famous. When I think Tavi Gevinson or Susie Bubble or Emily Weiss or, on the street spectrum, Tommy Ton, I think recognition based on the merit of astounding work."
Susie Lau: "I do want to address this issue after Fashion Week hubbub has died down, as I haven't quite figured how I feel yet, but for now, I suppose I have nothing to do except to go right ahead and confirm Menkes's exact suspicions: that we are all peacocking, however much we doth protest."
Isabel Wilkinson: "You can't hate on all the fashion bloggers in the world just because you can't get into your seat at a fashion show without having to walk past a few of them. And they may be swaddled in astrakhan when you see them, but not all fashion bloggers have had it easy. . . . Many have started their blogs from scratch and invariably hustled to make money off of them. Some are real entrepreneurs."
Khadijat Yussuff: "I think she fails to take into account the fact that a lot of these people are dressing for one another and themselves. . . . The point of personal style is that there is a trademark that is uniquely yours that you have developed and edited over time. And so what if it's out there, crazy, or impractical?"
So, what do you think about the role of fashion bloggers at Fashion Week? Has it damaged the industry? Has it made it better? Share your thoughts below or on Twitter!
Photo by Kamel Lahmadi/Style and the City
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