The dying art of blogging was once considered a hierarchy

Harper’s Bazaar, founded in 1867, was the world’s first fashion magazine. It was not until the 1930s that Virginia Pope, a New York Times journalist, brought fashion reporting to be considered as “serious news.”

Pope began pushing out fashion presentations under the publication’s sponsorship and sparked the start of New York Fashion Week (NYFW), one of fashion’s most prestigious events.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen, and Cosmopolitan emerged to be the few magazines that women relied on for their fashion content.

This shifted from dull reporting about clothing terminology to an engaging and creative style of reporting. For instance, the latest and hottest styles and trends that fashion reporting still follows today.

The world met the first blogs in the 1990s, and to put their impact into perspective, blogs grew from 50 to 184 million between 1999 and 2008.

Prestigious fashion magazines that provided content from experts, fashion houses, and designers, were slowly being replaced by an everyday person who had access to such platforms.

Christopher Blomquist, journalist and fashion journalism professor at Parsons School of Design, has witnessed the evolution of fashion reporting and in turn, the decline of fashion expert reporting.

“These days, you don't have to go to the newsstand to get your fashion news or pick up the latest issue of Vogue or wait for it to arrive in your mailbox. You just log on to your computer, and there is your video of the latest product fashion show,” Blomquist said.

Blomquist says fashion blogging became such an exciting advancement in fashion reporting because it offered a much faster and more accessible experience through less text and more visual components.

“It's gone totally to social media because video is now considered so much more important, and words are so less important,” Blomquist said.

“Just generally, people have less of an attention span. They want to see a video of the shows, and bullet points of ‘these were the five best shows in NYFW.’”

NYFW was formerly reserved for the designers, celebrities, and the press, though now that fashion reporting is delivered and received by bloggers and now more modernly, influencers—these events rely on their coverage.

Blomquist says he is among the journalists who experienced this change firsthand.

“I went to New Zealand Fashion Week years ago and in the final year that I went, a blogger came along,” he said.

“Her entire reporting of it was getting her picture taken in the front row that her boyfriend took, versus reporting about the collections.”

Rachel Behling, owner of Auburn Vintage Clothiers, a by-appointment vintage shop, has turned to social media to revive her business since its opening in 2014. Behling uses Instagram and Facebook to share the pieces she sells, often including brief texts of the piece’s historical background.

Behling says social media can do as much harm as it does good, and she has seen to this within fashion content on social media.

“There's a lot of misinformation out there as well,” Behling said.

“I think the more and more social media becomes popular and the more and more people consider this themselves ‘experts’, we need to be really mindful of the source and where it's coming from.”

Although print has always been a struggling industry, the rise of blogging intimidated the future of trained journalists but has allowed for a wider representation in not only the content itself but in the faces representing the content. Data from a set of 40 female blogs and four prominent U.S fashion magazines concluded that Black or African American representation was greater in blogs than in fashion magazines.

Lauren Subject, a fourth-year Creative Industries student with a minor in fashion studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, says fashion reporting through social media has exposed her to content with richer diversity than the fashion magazines she has been collecting over the last 10 years.

“Whether it is fashion journalism or any form of journalism, it is always enlightening to read content from the perspectives of a different demographic of people,” Subject said.

Subject said an issue with fashion content delivery on social media is now the oversaturation of fashion influencers. However, she also said this has influenced events such as NYFW to invite micro-influencers to cover or promote events, shifting the focus on those creators who usually come from the unrepresented side of the industry.

Blomquist says the arrival of the Internet and social media alone, aside from fashion, changed the world, and with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will also cause a vast change.

“Any technology evolution is going to be good or bad. Or somewhere in between. And have its positive and negative effects,” he said.