10 ottobre 2016
LM 65
SCIENCES OF FASHION / SOCIOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIORAL NETWORKS
I text: Rossi G., Fashion and Identity: the concealment or disclosure process? presented at the XI. ECSBS in Rome – September 1-4, 2016.
II text: Rossi G., “Broadcasting fashion on the Web: Magazines, blogs and social networks”article written for the European Journal of Research on Social Studies, August 2014.
•What has changed from 2014 to today?
•How they have evolved relationships and professions on the network?
•How they have changed the rules of the online communications?
•What communication scenarios are now open for the future?
•How can we prepare for them? How can we study them?
•How can we study and interpret networks today?
These are only some of the questions you have to ask to yourselves and to us during this course to create a state of mind/thinking useful to work in the fashion system today, especially in the communication part. On the other hand we must emphasize that many of the dynamics that highlight for fashion apply to many other sectors and can be applied elsewhere. Fashion communication online is a niche of fashion communication that is a niche itself of communication in general. The best way to study the dynamics of communication nowadays is immerse ourselves in it, armed with a proper toolbox.For this reason during this course we will work alongside theory and practice, exercises and field analysis to more analytical parts. It’s essential for the success of the course, for you, to get the full benefit, to put you actively towards this teaching and not in a passive way, as if the teacher were to just here tell truths and you record them and repeat them for the final exam.
In this course I would like to have a very interactive method, inspired by the design thinking approach. Design thinking is a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result. In this regard it is a form of solution-based, or solution-focused thinking – starting with a goal (a better future situation) instead of solving a specific problem. By considering both present and future conditions and parameters of the problem, alternative solutions may be explored simultaneously.
This approach differs from the analytical scientific method, which begins by thoroughly defining all parameters of a problem to create a solution. Design thinking identifies and investigates with known and ambiguous aspects of the current situation to discover hidden parameters and open alternative paths that may lead to the goal. Because design thinking is iterative, intermediate "solutions" are also potential starting points of alternative paths, including redefining of the initial problem.
In 2015 I published a book called “Fashion blogger, new dandy?” by comparison with journalists and fashion bloggers. Why? Because in the early years of fashion blogging or blogging in general- as researchers of communication, but also as professionals - what we wondered were the differences between journalists and bloggers. In my essay I fixed some points: 1) blogging can be a profession; 2) a profession that only sometimes it’s similar to journalism; 3) always more often a blogger is a testimonial not a witness of contemporary times; 4) the phenomenon of fashion blogger, in this sense, considering them as influencers, is not new, think about the dandies in the XIX century, and in particular of the the most famous one, Oscar Wilde. So, coming back to our “ridefining the initial problem” i mean exactly this: you have to start from a problem, analyze it, but don’t become fixated on it, you have to be always open minded and accept new solutions, especially in a so liquid society like the one in which we live.
We begin already in this first lesson by applying this method. The course is about networks and we must create our own ones that in the future can be useful to our career. Don’t be lazy, try always to go in depth with your colleagues, professors, guests of the course, ask always many questions, read as much as you can. This is also helpful for the part of the course devoted to storytelling, also for the creative part of the work, you need information, you need to feed your imagination. We can speak about digital networks or physical ones, about people or about locations. Everyday we must add something, we must enrich our list of contacts. And we must do this in the properly way, starting from the must have, the must known ones.
For this reason I would like to began each lesson with 15 minutes of press reviews in which students show/read to the class an article and comment it, underlining names and networks useful to connect with, for examples exploring the social networks sites related. Few words about inspiration. You can find it everywhere, in this sense it would be useful to enlarge this morning press review as a moment of sharing contents/contacts that would be useful for the growing of the full group. Exihibitions, tv-series, movies, upcoming designers, everything that you find interesting.
I will give you an example to understand better what I’m speaking about. If you want to work as trendsetter in the fashion universe, you must know some topic place, as Colette in Paris, a sort of pilgrimage place during Paris Fashion Week, that this year celebrates 20 years in business. In this article, on the daily web magazine BOF Business of Fashion ( the founder (with her mother Colette) Sarah Andelman talks about the genesis and the growth of Colette maybe the most iconic concept store in the world. Karl Lagerfeld said about them: “It’s the only shop where I go because they have things no one else has. I buy watches, telephones, jewellery there — everything really! They have invented a formula that you can’t copy easily, because there is only one Colette and her and Sarah are 200 percent involved.”
How they have achieved this?
Tenacity, passion, professionalism, constant research, creativity, talent…
“I feel lucky to have the freedom to evolve permanently from season to season, because even if I know many designers, some of them friends, at a certain point they can become locked in a certain style and I think that fashion is about a perpetual change and I say ‘bravo’ to the designers who are able to reinvent themselves time after time”
(Sarah Adelman)
The rise of online shopping and social media have been kind to Colette. The store generates 20 percent of its steadily-rising revenue online, significantly more than the industry average. Colette has also amassed over 822,000 followers Instagram where the store messages its continuous product drops.
Study this network, take inspirations from it. You have to start from something, and learning from the top players is always a good idea.
Off course Colette is only an example. We can make many more others. Would you like to try? Think about other concept stores and their social networks channels. Next lessons we’re going to analyze two successful case histories in fashion blogger, completely different one from the other, the italian Chiara Ferragni with The Blonde Salad and Alexa Chung. If you are interested in analyzing other fashion bloggers or influencers we can do it.
We’re going to see together the evolution of these fashion blogs that we can consider good examples of blogging. For now, in synthesis, Ferragni started with an outfit blog called The blonde salad that grew up during these years changing face moving to a more traditional fashion magazine. Outfits and similar pictures now are concentrated on Instagram and other social networks, with some repetitive hashtag like #theblondsaladgoesto… Miami, Los Angeles, Milan, etc etc. From a few months also Chiara’s sister, Valentina Ferragni, is part of the game, branding more and more the Ferragni’s name. Alexa Chung has a different style, not linked with her own family, not so closely linked to traditional luxury brands. They are both “it girls”, influencers, testimonials, trendsetters, bloggers…many names to mean the same thing they are iconic girls that sell their image for money. In the past we had the top models in the Nineties, after actress, pop singers, and so on.
From the website Indipendent Fashion Bloggers we can read a chronology of the fashion blogging history till 2012 that I report here for you (
December 1978: As the result of a chance photograph of Greta Garbo, Bill Cunningham published a group of his impromptu pictures in the New York Times, which soon became a regular series now known as his street style column.
1992: Tim Berners-Lee launches the first Web site, which had a “What’s New” page informing readers about new information related to the Web site.
1994: Claudio Pinhanez of MIT publishes his “Open Diary,” a Web page documenting his life. Also, online diarist Justin Hall gains notoriety for creating a “personal homepage” on the Web covering his day-to-day activities in very revealing detail.
December 1997: Jorn Barger starts a daily log of interesting Web links published in reverse chronological order, calling it Robot Wisdom WebLog. The term “Weblog” is used online publishers to include any page with frequent short posts in reverse chronological order.
1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the publishing of online journals. Other online journaling tools emerge, including LiveJournal (1999), DiaryLand (1999), Pitas (1999), Blogger (1999), Xanga (2000), Movable Type (2001) and WordPress (2003).
Spring 1999: Online journal author Peter Merholz takes Jorn Barger’s word “weblog” and splits it into the phrase “We blog.” Blog soon becomes shorthand for weblog — and 13 years later it’s still the term we use today!
1999: The development of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication makes it easier for people to subscribe to blog posts, as well as distribute them to other sites across the Internet.
2002: Fashion blogs begin to emerge on the internet.
2003: Glam Media, a company with more than 1,500 lifestyle websites and blogs, including Glam.com, is founded. The basis includes an ad network, where blogs come together under umbrella advertisements.
September 2003: Kathryn Finney of The Budget Fashionista was invited to New York Fashion Week.
2003: Using the alias Bboy777, Bryan Grey Yambao joined the blogosphere and eventually built a following for himself after posting stories about his weight-loss goals, fashion purchases and hatred for fake designer goods — in 2004 he became “Bryanboy.”
October 2004: Manolo the “Shoe Blogger” starts writing posts to his site.
February 2004: The launch of Flickr, a photo-sharing community, helps popularize photo blogging.
2004: Videographer Steve Garfield launches his video blog and declares 2004 “The Year of the Video Blog,” more than a year before the birth of YouTube.
2005:Julie Fredrickson creates fashion blogging network Coutorture, which grows into anonline publication, community and blog network comprised of over 240 editorially selected fashion, beauty, perfume, accessory, and streetwear blogs.
September 2005: The Sartorialist, aka Scott Schuman, begins blogging about fashion on the streets. According to an article on Business of Fashion: According to Mr. Schuman, The Sartorialist was originally inspired by Brooklyn-based writer Grace Bonney’s interior design blog Design*Sponge. “I could tell she was doing it by herself and I liked the idea that she was having an interaction,” he said. “She had like 30 comments on a post and I thought that was really cool.” Schuman decided to start a similar blog for fashion after examining a series of photos he had taken of a few stylish guys in New York’s Fulton fish market while on a photography course.
2006: The Fug Girls start writing for New York Magazine.
2006: The launch of Twitter, one of the first “micro-blogging” communities that allows user to publish and receive short posts via the Web, text messaging and instant messaging.
2006: A research report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates that 12 million U.S. adults publish their own blogs.
2006: Julie Fredrickson ambushes Anna Wintour at New York Fashion Week.
2006: Manolo’s Shoe Blog was, “rumored to be [earning] around $700,000 a year.”
2007: Sugar, the San Francisco site for women’s content, announced it has acquired Coutorture.
2007: Technorati reports it is tracking more than 112 million blogs worldwide.
2007: Rumi Neely starts posting her vintage finds to eBay.
September 5, 2007: Founded by Jennine Jacob, IFB is created.
March 31, 2008: At age eleven, Tavi Gevinson begins writing “Style Rookie.”
2008:Neely launches a separate site to her eBay account, called “Fashion Toast,” and posts her first personal style photos.
April 2009: Neely is featured in CNN Money for her blogging business, which states she was getting “35,000 hits a day.”
September 2009:IFB hosts an event with two panels about fashion blogging which evolved into the IFB Conference (and we are now presenting our 7th conference this September)!
2009: Dolce & Gabbana made news by filling its front row—typically the sole provenance of A-list actresses and Anna Wintour—with fashion bloggers, even equipping them with laptops.
2009: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)publishes its regulations regarding bloggers.
September 2010: Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky Magazine, leaves the print biz to start her own blog, at age 48.
2010: Leandra Medine, creator of The Man Repeller, was studying journalism in college when she started her blog.
2010: The FTC publicly investigates the company Ann Taylor after mandating an update thatstipulates that bloggers must disclose “any material connections they share with the seller of the product or service” when writing about it.Bloggers and brands can be fined up to $11,000 for failing to reveal sponsorships. According to Mashable, “Ann Taylor invited bloggers to preview its Summer 2010 LOFT collection, promising attendees a ‘special gift’ and entry into a ‘mystery gift-card drawing’ for those who submitted posts to the company within 24 hours of the event. Ann Taylor avowed to reveal the value of the gift cards, which ranged from $50 to $500, to bloggers after receiving their posts.” No fines were levied.
October 2011:Notable fashion journalist Derek Blasberg, Harper’s Bazaar Editor at Large and a published author, starts a blog on the side called, “Mr. Blasberg.”
June 2012: Scott Schuman states he was disgruntled by the D&G fashion show back in 2009 in an article by GQ: “[Dolce & Gabbana] got a humongous amount of press. … ‘Look, we brought the bloggers in and gave them the front row. Look at the dancing-monkey bloggers!’ ” He then added, “I could barely bring myself to sit down.”
2012: Nick Axelrod leaves Elle for Emily Weiss’s beauty blog Into The Gloss, where he is in the early stages of hiring contributing writers.
2012: Leandra Medine is also expanding her content by trying out new writers so that she may transition from a “blog” to a website — which she describes as a cross between Vogue and Jezebel.
2012: Tavi Gevinson parlays Style Rookie into Rookie Mag, a larger site for young women.
So, what’s next in the timeline? It seems that a few of the more prominent personal bloggers are expanding to develop bigger websites. Does this mean that bloggers are headed to be the next big time fashion editors, presenting their insight on the web rather than in pages of a glossy? What do you think?
The very first personal style blogs weren’t started as launch pads for fame (in the form of millions of followers) or fortune (lucrative endorsement deals). They began quite innocently as creative outlets.A lot has changed in the last decade. Below, we trace the history of the personal style blog, an internet phenomenon that has both democratized the fashion industry and turned shameless narcissism into a viable career path.
From: The racked.com “The definitive history of personal style blogs, from BryanBoy to ManRepeller” ( 27 may, 2015
AUGUST 2004 - Patricia Handschiegel founds StyleDiary.net, which is widely considered the first personal style blog. She will spend several years documenting her outfits and purchases before eventually introducing supplementary content. In 2007, the blog is sold to social shopping site StyleHive for an undisclosed sum and Handschiegel, no longer a personal style blogger, becomes something of a serial entrepreneur.
OCTOBER 2004- Bryan Yambao, a 24-year-old label-obsessed web developer, starts BryanBoy. It's as much a personal style blog (featuring his much-copied arm-out stance) as a Xanga-inspired diary devoted to his shopping escapades and splashy social life in Manila. He becomes famous—fast—and in 2008, Marc Jacobs names a purse after him. This is just the beginning for Yambao, who continues to sit front row at Fashion Week to this day.