Fashion Blog Favorites Not That Crazy About Fashion Blogs

Here’s one… different fashion blog trend: turns out a lot of fashion blogger favorites aren’t that into most fashion blogs.

“Blogs are ridiculous; they’re just mood boards – unless you are Tavi [Gevinson, of Style Rookie]”

– Alexa Chung in the June 2011 edition of Vogue UK {via Fashion Foie Gras/Lockerz}

A point of view that it seems the New York Times‘ Cathy Horyn shares.

“It’s a lack of original content. Sooner or later, it’s like anything, people change, people look at that and say ‘This is boring.’ And some young journalist will come along and distinguish themselves with original reporting. And they will hopefully be fluent in French and very good at reporting what’s going on at the luxury goods companies and the big brands in Europe, because there’s a complete need for that kind of reporting. You can be tough and feisty and a little bit of a guerrilla reporter, for want of a better word, and I think there’s a need for that. I don’t think a lot of the blogs are distinguishing themselves by linking and just being snarky or being opinionated. Do some reporting.”

– Cathy Horyn in an interview with ($20 million fashion blog) Refinery29

And even the most influential fashion blogger of them all.

“I’m not really a fan of personal style blogs—you know, the ones [on which] these girls just shoot their outfits and all this stuff. I haven’t seen one that I really like or that draws my attention every day. The good and bad of that is that most these girls only have a limited wardrobe; they don’t have many clothes to shoot and I don’t think most of them have come up with looks that are that interesting, that draw me.”

– Scott Schuman, aka the Sartorialist in an interview with (Style.com fashion blog) StyleFile

Schuman does give some credit to the time capsule that all of the personal style blogs will become in decades to come, but in general let’s remember that “fashion blog” covers a lot of territory these days. As evidenced by the fact that 2 out of 3 of these quotes came from…wait for it… fashion blogs.

To Ms. Horyn’s point, speaking purely from personal experience there are plenty of fashion stories we try to report on, but big brand representatives tend to not reply – not even to give a “no comment” – to people who try to do reporting when they don’t have a major news organization behind them. An example? Sure. For weeks, we reached out to retailers who’d participated in Fashion’s Night Out to try to paint of picture of the real financial impact of Fashion’s Night Out. We love the excitement it generates, but we’re not convinced it’s actually a sales boon for participating retailers. Unfortunately, since no one would comment, we can’t be sure. Another example? You’ve got it. There was an interesting piece in the New York Times (you probably saw it) on the expense that went into producing Marc Jacobs’ most recent show. You know what we were really interested in? What happened to those 1100 yards of vinyl that were brought in for the even after the show. After all, if a company spends that much on props for a show, you’d hope they would find an interesting way to reuse them. Unfortunately, none of our emails or phone calls requesting comment or more information were returned. US or Paris. Not that we’re complaining: there are a lot of emerging fashion companies doing some really interesting things who are happy to reply to us, and more often than not, we learn about them via blogs like the Business of Fashion or FashionablyMarketing.me or by actually getting out to events and doing some reporting.

A new fashion blog comes along every day, so inevitably at some point it becomes difficult to separate the signal from the noise, but let’s not write off an entire category because you tune out for a bit.