Style bloggers take centre stage
By Nicola Copping
It’s Milan fashion week and the seats for Dolce & Gabbana’s spring/summer 2010 ready-to-wear show for its D&G line are filling up with the industry’s most influential figures. On the front row, legs crossed, watching from behind customary dark glasses, sits Anna Wintour, celebrated editor of US Vogue magazine. One row back – a small step for man, a giant leap for fashionkind – is Burt Tansky, chief executive of US department store Neiman Marcus.
Also on the front row, nestled between the cashmere-draped shoulders of Sally Singer, US Vogue’s fashion news/features director, and Michael Roberts, Vanity Fair’s fashion and style director, sits a slender, less familiar figure dressed in grey T-shirt, jewelled necklace and tuxedo jacket. Meet Bryan Grey-Yambao, known as Bryanboy to the 215,000 unique users who visit his eponymous blog each day (British Vogue magazine, by comparison, sells just over 200,000 copies a month.)
From the small bedroom in Manila that he describes as “a cocoon”, Bryanboy, 23, has distilled his thoughts, on everything from models’ cellulite to Lady Gaga wearing Alexander McQueen’s latest designs, into a colourful and, for many, compulsive online diary that mixes chatty show commentary with blurred photos of himself in eccentric outfits and select snapshots of the exclusive world of fashion. One recent shot shows British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman plonked on a concrete floor, legs outstretched, head in a good book as a fashion show refuses to start on time. Beneath the picture, Bryanboy writes: “I smiled when I found this photo. She looks so calm reading a book or, perhaps, her notes? ”
Staring at the lens of a camera trained on his front row seat, Bryanboy knows that his thoughts on the catwalk spectacle about to unfold in front of him will make it on to his website before any of his front row neighbours even make it to the next show. His up-to-the-minute commentary is why his readers log on. It is why the Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana invited him. Yet, as he sits squished between industry veterans, his expression seems to ask: “Should I really be here?”
The answer is, of course, yes: fashion bloggers, like the cool kids in school, have become a kind of elite band. Readers catching up with them in offices, bedrooms and internet cafés across the globe look to them for humour, catty criticisms and accessible entertainment that costs them nothing but the energy required to click mouse with forefinger.
Moreover, the best and most popular, such as the Sartorialist, Scott Schuman’s photographic chronicle of what the well-dressed person on the street is wearing (visited by 225,000 people a day), are viewed as tastemakers in much the same way as powerful style journalists such as Wintour and Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune. Brands invite Schuman to consult for them. American Apparel, Net-a-Porter and Hogan advertise on the Sartorialist, and other websites, such as Condé Nast’s Style.com, host a pocket-sized version of his site.
“I speak to you as I speak to any of my other friends,” is how Schuman explains his appeal. “I’m not shackled by advertising or an editor. I shoot men on intuition and I shoot women on absolute experience; the quality of what I shoot is so strong that people really don’t have to ask why.” At one recent signing session for Schuman’s first book, also called The Sartorialist, fans waited in line at Liberty in London for four hours.
Full article: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/89f8c07c-cfe0-11de-a36d-00144feabdc0.html
