Dear Medianuts,
Blog. Think. Do. Study.
Most importantly, learn.
Adaobi
P.S. I seriously enjoyed this class and gained so much insight from it. Thanks colleagues for the riveting class discussions, thanks Dr. C for coaxing the medianuts out of us, and thanks Mrs. Filgo for being our efferverscent, omnipresent virtual (and physical) librarian! Hope you all have safe, fun, and restful Christmas breaks!
What is fashion? According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, fashion is “the prevailing style (as in dress) during a particular time or a garment in such a style.” My preferred definition of fashion is that of Edwin Hubbel, “Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.” Fashion is a multibillion-dollar international industry that determines how we view others and ourselves in clothing.
A major theme in fashion is identity; Quentin Crisp said it best when he said that “fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” Fashion is the medium of identity, much in the same fashion (pun intended) as avatars in Lucasfilm’s Habitat. Chip Morningstar and and F. Randall Farmer state plainly how things are to work in their virtual world: “The idea behind our world was precisely that it did not come with a fixed set of objectives for its inhabitants, but rather provided a broad palette of possible activities from which the players could choose, driven by their own internal inclinations”. Fashion doesn’t really have a true objective, but is controlled by the consumer, driven by what the ‘user’ considers fitting. Avatars in habitat, many times, will demonstrate an extension of one’s personality rather than a duplicate representation, a lot like fashion does in the real world.
Now the appropriate question to ask would be, “What’s new media, in terms of fashion?” To understand the new media, we must first understand the old media. The ‘old’ media of fashion mostly consists of magazines and other print media. The most influential fashion magazines are Vogue, Elle, and Marie Claire, in that order. Vogue was first established in 1892 in the United States and has been published monthly ever since; on the other hand, Elle and Marie Claire were both first established in France in 1945 and 1937 (respectively). Other forms of ‘old’ media in fashion include newspapers that include Style sections such the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. The new media in fashion has been brought about by the Internet revolution. The milestones of fashion new media are the websites of designers, e-commerce, and blogs. Websites are innovatory to the fashion industry because prior to the Internet, the only ways designers could have shown their designs were through runway shows that only the elite could attend, and ad campaigns, which run in fashion publications (and occasionally on billboards). With websites, designers can display advertising campaigns without having to pay the cost to magazines for space. Through websites comes another innovation of fashion new media: e-commerce. E-commerce is the process of buying merchandise electronically and having it mailed, rather than having to go a boutique or a department store. E-commerce is yet another way to make high fashion available to the everyday man. Lastly, blogs, the new medium of fashion I have decided to focus on, have allowed for a change in fashion. Not only have blogs also made fashion more accessible to the everyday man, but they have also turned the tables in fashion because they allow designers to get feedback, fashion outsiders to give commentary, and in general, blogs have allowed for more discussion in the fashion community. A fashion blog is just a blog that deals with fashion and merchandising. Fashion blogs are most easily characterized by the focus of the content: model/celebrity, shopping/merchandising, commentary, street fashion, lifestyle, and publication extension.
Even though blogs have seemed to make overnight changes in fashion, blogs took a long time to come to be as they are. Here is a timeline of the progression of the blog form: 1969: The Internet is invented. • 1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposes the development of the World Wide Web as a way to share information with colleagues. • 1992: Tim Berners-Lee launches the first Web site • 1994: Claudio Pinhanez of MIT publishes his “Open Diary” at the same time as online diarist Justin Hall • 1995: FrontPage, one of the first Web publishing tools, is released • 1997: Jorn Barger starts a log of Web links published in reverse chronological order, calling it Robot Wisdom WebLog. • 1998: Open Diary becomes one of the first online tools to assist users in the publishing of online journals • 1999: Peter Merholz borrows Barger’s word “weblog” and splits it into the phrase “We blog.” Blog soon becomes shorthand for weblog. • 2002: The launch of Technorati, one of the first blog search engines, making it possible for people to track blog conversations on a continuous basis. • 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. • February 2004: Flickr launches • 2005: Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center launch Global Voices • March 2005: Garrett M. Graff becomes the first blogger to receive credentials for the daily White House briefing. • 2006: Twitter launches • 2006: Research report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project estimates that 12 million U.S. adults publish their own blogs. • 2007: Technorati reports it is tracking more than 112 million blogs worldwide.
Blogging has had such a huge impact on modern fashion, especially on fashion’s trickledown theory. This theory is essentially that the fashion elite dictate the trends that become all the rage. This cycle usually starts with New York Fashion Week, the most important week in fashion, where the top designers exhibit their collections and because this event is invitation-only, the audience is filled with celebrities, top magazine editors, and socialites. Once the designs are shown, the audience members will then buy/borrow the looks. Because we live in a culture that seeks to emulate the well known, the designs will then trickledown to everyday people. Because designs are now readily available to the public, bloggers can become ‘insiders’ through giving their commentary and even rejecting the trends that are being pushed. This is most evident in how fashion has worked for a while; America has always had style decades. The fifties called for pastels and year-round Easter Sunday clothes, the sixties were time for mod and hippie clothes, while the polyester and bell-bottoms prevailed in the seventies. The eighties were a time for bold colors and exaggerated silhouettes, the nineties called for dull colors and loose, baggy clothes, but what could be said for the fashion of this decade soon to be over? Most would answer that there are too many fashions just to say that a few pieces could define our decade’s fashion. This was all because of the Internet and its bloggers. The Internet gave bloggers the resources for bloggers and others interested in fashion to have a voice and speak forcefully with it, thus the various number of styles that the 2000s can call its own.
George Santayana once said that “fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.” Something very similar can be said about education; education is a system that is perpetuated without examination simply because it produces results and these aren’t the best possible. Ivan Illich puts it best from this excerpt from the article “Deschooling Society”: “The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been tested and classified as potential money-makers or power-holders. No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages in the game, proved themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university co-opts the discoverer and the potential dissenter.” Blogs are changing the very mechanism of fashion. No longer are the ‘certified’ fashion editors determining what becomes all the rage. With the backing of the Internet, people who simply seek to become fashion experts become just that, demonstrated best by Tavi Gevinson. Tavi Gevinson is the true champion of fashion blogging. Now age 13, she started her fashion blog at age 11 and because of the depth of her fashion analysis, she was invited to New York’s Fashion Week this year. Tavi became a fashion insider simply because she used all the resources the Internet offered and now is not only following fashion but setting it as well.
