Thanks But No Thanks, NY Mag: The Fashion Blog-Bashing Has To Stop

I have a confession to make: I recently attended Mercedes Benz Fashion Week as a fashion blogger. :o

Everything was going fine until Monday last week, ten days after MBFWA finished, when many, many Facebook friends began pointing me in the direction of a NY Magazine article by fashion critic Robin Givhan, proclaiming, in a nutshell, that ‘fashion blogging is sah ova‘.

In the piece, Givhan essentially tells us that bloggers used to be remotely interesting to the industry — but now that they’re successful on a mass scale and followed by hundreds of thousands of fans, they’re no longer relevant. …Sounds like totally solid logic to me.

In response, Australia’s own The Vine churned out an article about the article, re-hashing Givhan’s original piece point by point. They couldn’t quite bring themselves to challenge the conclusion that Givhan makes, sitting on the fence instead to concede that her laboured argument seems “half right”.

I’m so tired of these opinion pieces. Is an article proclaiming “blogs are totes 2010!” even news anymore? The ironic brilliance of Givhan’s entire point is that she still believes that in 2014, a “fashion critic” can proclaim what is and isn’t in, and the masses will follow dutifully. It’s the very thinking that rendered the institution vulnerable in the first place.

So before you pile hatred upon this blogger in a thick rain of disdain (as is the trend these days), I’d just like to point out a few things.

Fashion Bloggers Don’t Care What Magazines Think

First of all, fashion bloggers really don’t give a shit what NY Mag thinks – that’s arguably why they became important in the first place. The idea that they need some kind of cred or approval from magazines is ridiculous; I have never heard a blogger asking, ‘What does Anna Wintour think about me?’

Many fashion magazines have spent decades delivering beautiful fashion art that none of us could ever hope to emulate in real life. Either that, or they’re telling us that some outlandish trend is actually totally legitimate. Like wearing a midriff to work. Or pairing Birkenstocks with a $1000 dress. And hey, it isn’t bloggers who are trying to make Normcore happen.

“The distance between the Establishment and fashion’s once-dazzling revolutionaries has narrowed, and there is minimal distinction between them,” says Givhan — but she couldn’t be more wrong.

What we do is completely and utterly different to what a fashion magazine does. They have amazingly talented groups of professionals who are getting paid to deliver a professional product that must sell units in order to stay profitable. They garner gorgeous celebrities to grace their covers in an expensive shoot featuring expensive clothing. They can afford a legendary photographer, rather than asking their hubby to begrudgingly snap an iPhone pic in a  back alley before date night.

Givhan proclaims she knows what bloggers think, whilst showing she absolutely does not know what bloggers think. She ends her article on this piece of hilarity: “…newcomers are drawn to fashion, not because they are determined to change it, but because they are mesmerized by it. They want to be the next Anna Wintour — not make her existence obsolete.”

And with that, Givhan shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates us — a misunderstanding that bloggers are used to by now. People can never quite believe that I do what I do for free, and it makes them suspicious. So why do we do it? The answer is in part because there are fuck-all good journalism jobs these days. The other part is because we love it. We genuinely love it.

It’s not because we’re all part of some big conspiracy to bring down Hearst. It’s not because we have a lack of respect for fashion magazines and the people who work for them. It’s definitely not because we want to be Anna Wintour — although I would totally love her wardrobe.

And to be honest, the idea that lil ol’ me and 10,000 of my insta-friends blogging our $49 daily outfits is somehow threatening to, or competing with, fashion magazines is hilarious and completely untrue.

Good Fashion Bloggers Aren’t In It For Money

I spend hours after work blogging about things I love till midnight, totally ignoring my husband over dinner to take a selfie, or attempting to look barely presentable in an #ootd — and at no point do I expect to get paid for it. I love blogging. I don’t have ads on my site, and I’ve NEVER been paid for one post I’ve done.

Great, dedicated fashion bloggers (and bloggers in general) do it for the love of it – not to garner some ill-feted cash grab at #relevance. Not to sit in the front row of a fashion show. And not for a meaningless thumbs up from magazines or “fashion critics”.  I mean, what even IS a ‘fashion critic’ anyway?

Of course, that’s not the case for everyone — and real, for-the-love-of-it bloggers hate on those people too. Local personalities/money machines like Sydney Fashion Blogger and They All Hate Us take cash for comment in the form of either payment for posts or freebies, and we’re all aware they’re making the rest of us look bad. Meanwhile, the fashion PRs and designers put them in the front row, 100% aware of their questionable ethics; SFB has admitted at least 75% of her posts are paid for, and yet she’s at the top of the invite list.

So in the end, isn’t it the fashion industry itself who should shoulder the blame for their continued rise? Aren’t they the ones who are valuing quantity over quality?

Sorry “fashion critics”, but us bloggers aren’t the ones making room for ourselves in the front row to block your view with a ridiculous hat.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

In the end, us bloggers are the ones getting off our butts every day to bring our viewers content — and for free at that. What we are doing is adding to the conversation – and that’s what makes the democratic, varied, busy world of the internet so amazing.

We don’t get paid three figure salaries to tell you that a Prada dress that walked down the runway in Paris is fashionable (like, der.) We generally get herded into fashion shows last minute to stand up the back, being smirked at by D list celebrities and WAGs who were actually invited like the outsiders we are.

And we may just be the only ones in Australia who are actually buying fashion magazines at the moment – even if it is just to Instagram a flat lay with a cup of herbal tea and some flowers.

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Bianca O’Neill writes for Channel [V], Eventfinder and Time Out Melbourne. She founded AlphabetPony.com.au, and in her spare time posts her daily outfit for others to criticise on Instagram.