Catwalk vs. Sidewalk

 

 

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About a year ago a fashion journalist Suzy Menkes wrote an interesting article called “The Circus of Fashion”, which inspired long discussions about the phenomenon of street style. She wrote:

 

„Today, the people outside fashion shows are more like peacocks than crows. They pose and preen, in their multipatterned dresses, spidery legs balanced on club-sandwich platform shoes, or in thigh-high boots under sculptured coats blooming with flat flowers“.

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That is absolutely right. The action outside the fasion shows’ can be considered as much important as what happens on the official runway. Or perhaps – more important? A few months after Fern Mallis, the former executive director of the CFDA and the creator of New York Fashion Week, opened another discussion. There was emphasized the recent trend in fashion shows, where the first row of the show is reserved for bloggers and therefore buyers are sitting on the third. An interesting question arises out of this problem – should bloggers be banned in the fashion weeks?

 

This video gives another perspective.

 

Consequently, what is happening? Is the fashion playground getting too small? Or are we facing  the new trend, though, have not been able to realise it yet? The last five years I was observing (and still do) this rapidly growing power of bloggers and street style photographers. In this case, all I could say that they changed and influenced fashion industry a lot. Definitely, when a new player gets in the game, others usually are not happy about it. However, in this particular case we should not refer only to becoming more or less powerful. I believe, it is precisely about more opportunities and possibilities. As Tim Blank once put it that the bloggers „can be part of dialogue“. Personally, I think, it is amazing how something, at first sight, so usual – people‘s style and time before the show – have grown into the time to take advantage of and to get where one’s what – into the fashion industry. At the end, despite all those discussions, it still is all about the clothes.

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 Author:

Aida Ivanauskaite

 

Photos: 

http://le-21eme.com

http://www.wmagazine.com