Curators of cool
A handful of bloggers are helping the world decide what’s cool. But how did they gain such influence? Jane Szita investigates
ILLUSTRATION: RHONALD BLOMMESTIJN
“I remember the day I first got 1,000 visits, after I’d been doing the blog for a few months. I thought that was pretty amazing!”
Marcus Fairs, founder of possibly the world’s most influential design blog, Dezeen, is reminiscing about his early days as a bedroom blogger as he navigates Shoreditch on his way to Dezeen’s pop-up store at the London Design Festival.
“Now, five years later, we get 100,000 hits a day and we have 150,000 Facebook fans – the numbers are just mad,” he says.
Visitors check out Dezeen for a quick-and-easy guide to what’s new, and above all cool, in the world of design and architecture. Like other big hitters among style blogs – The Cool Hunter, The Sartorialist – Dezeen is easy to use and habit forming, thanks to big, beautiful images, frequent updates (several a day) and the quality of its posts.
Fairs, former editor of Icon magazine, has the infallibly good eye that style bloggers need, to sift the internet for the projects that seem really key. “When I started the site back in 2006, the word ‘blog’ brought to mind a ranting individual,” says Fairs. “I was the first blogger not to push my opinions, but to present a selection of stuff . The selection is the opinion.”
The interactive element of blogs helped him to refine his approach, he says. “It was like a revelation aft er years of print: I could immediately see what people liked and what they didn’t.”
Rather than creating content, sites like Dezeen ‘curate’ it, sift ing through a digital avalanche and publishing only the fraction that they (and, crucially, readers) consider really significant.
And they have grown exponentially, helped by improvements in bandwidth and the growth of social media. “10% of our traffic comes from Facebook,” says Fairs. “When I first started to notice that, about 18 months ago, I made the site easier for Facebook users. Once, I saw Facebook as a threat, but now I realise it’s like a giant marketing machine with zero cost and mutual benefits.”
Facebook has also massively increased the noise online, and also the popularity of gatekeeper sites that promise to cut through it.
“The web has reached a tipping point,” says Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation. “We’re overwhelmed with content. Google’s CEO has said the world created five exabytes of data from the beginning of time until 2008. Now we produce that every two days. YouTube is delivering three billion videos a day, Facebook hosts 140 billion photos, 70 billion of them uploaded in the past year. We’re drowning in data. Curation is the human solution to the digital problem.”
It makes curation sites valuable sales tools, and the result has been what Marcus Fairs calls “a land grab of blogs by brands.” The effects are most evident in fashion, where a blogger like Manila- based Bryanboy – who wouldn’t have got into a catwalk show five years ago – now sits one seat away from the editor of American Vogue, Anna Wintour.
He is not alone in his new-found influence: Texan teen Jane Aldridge (Sea of Shoes) has already designed shoe collections for Urban Outfitters, while Scott Schuman (of The Sartorialist) and Susanna Lau (Style Bubble) have modelled for Gap.
Schuman is a perfect example of a blogging success. An ex-fashion retailer, he started The Sartorialist in 2005 as a place to post his photos of street style. Thanks to his talent as a photographer and style spotter, the blog attracts 140,000 hits a day and has won Schuman editorial jobs for GQ, Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris and Interview, as well as ad campaigns for Nespresso, DKNYJeans, Cant, Absolut and others.
“Sites like The Sartorialist have changed everything,” says Mat Bickely of Joyn, a London-based digital marketing agency. “Trends posted there will be re- posted to reach hundreds of thousands overnight. It increases their impact tenfold. They become part of the zeitgeist, universal and global, ending up on everyone’s mood boards. That has a huge impact on designers.”
He reckons catwalk trends such as ankle-length trousers, brogues worn without socks and gold digital watches can all be traced back to The Sartorialist and other street-style sites.
But the democratising effects of blogs don’t stop there. They have penetrated the formerly closed world of haute couture and dragged it into popular culture as never before. “Bloggers and social media users have undercut the exclusivity of runway shows,” says Rob Walker, author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. “What happens at runway shows is now instantly available, globally, to anyone who’s interested.”
Now fashion brands – aft er initial resistance – are focussing on blogs’ ability to drive online commerce, which is currently increasing by 20% a year in luxury goods, according to Italy’s Altagamma foundation.
Yet Mat Bickley believes that business is only slowly waking up. “We tell our clients that they have to arm bloggers with tools, not press releases,” he says. “Brands have to come up with something, like a short film, that the bloggers can post. With the rise of social media, brands should have one clear goal – creative content. They have to be publishers in their own right.”
Converse spends 90% of its marketing budget on ‘content development’, according to Forbes, and has opened its own recording studio in Brooklyn.
But the blogger-brand partnership has pitfalls. Some firms have had PR disasters by ‘astroturfing’ – planting fake ‘grass roots’ blogs online – and being caught.
And abuse of product placement has led to a new law in the USA, requiring bloggers to disclose relationships to companies whose products they promote, according to Disney Roller Girl – real name Navaz Batliwalla. She started her blog, based around her work as a fashion photographer, five years ago. “As I became more known, I started to get inundated by brands and PRs wanting to work with me,” she says.
“Essentially, they see your reach and your influence and naturally they want to piggy-back on it. I have been asked to ‘design’ bags or ‘curate’ fashion projects, but have turned them down because they weren’t a natural fit.” She has worked with Ralph Lauren, Club Monaco, Harvey Nichols and Swarovski, “either because I liked the project or I love the brand.”
But it’s still old media that decides who gets such gigs, reckons Mat Bickley: “Star bloggers are stars because of the traditional media. That gives them great exposure and so brands pick up on them,” he says. “But there will always be someone, because personal recommendation is what sells. It’s really no different to the days before we had the internet, when we just bought whatever the cool people had. Bloggers are the new most popular kids in school.”
