Tag Archives: fashion industry

When new media turns nasty

New Media Mogul has recently started paying attention to blogging within the fashion industry – holding it up as a good example of how a media facing organisation can use the opportunities created by the social media software movement to its benefit. Now it appears that an ‘insider blog’ about the fashion industry called Maghag has been launched, which exposes the unpleasant side of the fashion industry in much the same way that the recent anti-Ted Ballieu blog exposed the ugly side of the Victorian Liberal Party.

A whole separate debate could be had about the appropriateness of these insider blogs, but it is hard to argue that the ‘no holds barred’ approach that is often found in blogs makes for more original, authentic and interesting media content than the overly sanitized approach of the mainstream media.

You can read the full article here, and a big thankyou to my father, John Macdonald, for sourcing this article.

The fashion industry gets it right

Sporting organisations might be struggling to get their head around new media but at least the fashion industry seems to understand it. Organisers of Australian Fashion Week paid for some ‘elite’ bloggers to travel to Sydney to cover the event last week. According to Rachel Wells in The Age:

‘We’ve invited some of these guys here because our role is to get people talking about Australian fashion. And when you’ve got bloggers that provide immediate commentary within hours, even minutes, of a show finishing, and they are communicating to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the globe, why wouldn’t you get them here?’ says Australian Fashion Week founder Simon Lock.

One of the bloggers invited, Bryanboy believes that the power of the blogger lies in the ability to give uncensored, unedited fashion commentary to a global audience. As he says, ‘I think readers trust us because they know we don’t have a vested interest…We don’t have editors or advertisers to please like magazines and I think that gives us a lot more cred. We tell it how it is and people really value that’.

The thing to note about the fashion industry is that its media coverage is different to that of sport. It relies on monthly magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to get its products out in the public domain – so blogging is a god-send for the industry because now it has almost immediate access to its consumers. Sport quite self evidently has never had this problem but it could still learn from Bryanboy’s point – fans appreciate a view where there is no vested interest. And making content exclusive on the web as in the case of the IPL does not encourage citizen journalists to cover sporting events.