Fashion Journalism

Julie Bradford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351174602
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

This comprehensively revised and updated second edition of Fashion Journalism examines the vast changes within the industry and asks what they mean for the status, practices, and values of journalism worldwide.

Providing first-hand guidance on how to report on fashion effectively and responsibly, this authoritative text covers everything from ideas generation to writing news and features, video production, podcasting, and styling, including advice on how to stay legally and ethically safe while doing so. The book takes in all types of fashion content – from journalism to branded content, and from individual content creation to editorial for fashion brands. It explores their common practices and priorities, while examining journalists' claim to special status compared to other content producers.

In conjunction with expanded theory and research, the book includes interviews with journalists, editors, bloggers, filmmakers, PRs, and brand content producers from the UK, the US, China, and the Middle East to offer all a student or trainee needs to know to excel in fashion journalism.

1 Introduction*

When I wrote the first edition of Fashion Journalism, the media industry was in a state of huge flux. As the book went to press in 2014, publications I had focused on including high-fashion website Never Underdressed went under, while others like Company magazine and The Independent were about to go digital-only.

I remember wishing that everything would stay still for a while, so the book wouldn’t be redundant before it even came out. Of course, nothing stood still; if anything, the pace of change increased.

People are now consuming more media but are doing it differently. Out of an average of 12 hours 9 minutes a day they spend on media in the US, more than half is on digital – including three hours on their phone – with just 11 minutes on newspapers and 9 minutes on magazines (eMarketer, 2019). That is less than 3 per cent of their media time on print.

Meanwhile, Instagram surpassed one billion users in 2018, and became so influential in fashion that Lauren Sherman, chief correspondent for The Business of Fashion in New York, told me: ‘Instagram is the only magazine that matters right now’ (2018).

Whether you agree with that or not, it is clear that the whole way that fashion coverage is produced, financed, and consumed is shifting, with profound implications for journalism.

What has not changed, however, is the appetite for fashion content. Fashion is thriving on digital and social media, especially visually led platforms such as Instagram. The public appetite for behind-the-scenes insight, live-streamed shows, commentary, and visual inspiration has led to what fashion journalist Alexander Fury calls ‘an explosion of more and more people writing about fashion – in terms of criticism, blogging, and influencing’ (2018).

Fashion has always been important in financial terms; it is a massive industry worth $2.4 trillion worldwide a year (BoF-McKinsey, 2016). Culturally, it has grown into a branch of the broader entertainment industry. Not only are celebrities intertwined with fashion like never before, but industry figures like designers, editors, and stylists have become celebrities themselves.

And in social terms, it is fascinating to see fashion become part of wider conversations about politics, gender, identity, and women’s rights, especially in the context of the worldwide #MeToo movement. Alexander Fury, fashion features director for AnOther magazine and men’s critic for the Financial Times, recalls the excitement of watching the Rick Owens spring–summer 2019 show in Paris as, across the Atlantic in the United States, Dr Christine Blasey Ford wrapped up her testimony accusing a Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault.

Fury says:

People were talking about the Supreme Court and women’s rights, and then out came these women wielding torches at Rick Owens and burned the place down. What an amazing message! What an amazing vehicle to show that message about women! All these conversations are happening, and fashion is part of this.

(2018)

These conversations about fashion are taking place on more platforms than ever before, not just the magazines and newspapers for which Fury works. On social media, bloggers and influencers are talking directly to huge, engaged audiences, and have become a major branch of the fashion media industry in their own right. The influencer economy on Instagram alone was worth an estimated $1.7 billion in 2019 and was expected to double by 2020 (Mediakix, 2019). That doesn’t include China, which blocks Instagram but has an even more evolved influencer industry on social media sites such as WeChat and Weibo.

Fashion brands themselves are producing content to fill their digital and social media channels or hiring agencies and influencers to do it for them. Euan Smart, editorial manager at luxury and streetwear retailer END., says they decided to step up content when they found that individuals were landing on their website multiple times a day:

These customers that are coming to the website, sometimes more than 10 times in a single day, aren’t just looking for product – they’re looking for a deeper connection to the END. brand.

So, to meet that need we provide what we consider high-value, publisher-standard content that can entertain them, inspire them, and inform them. The lines are blurring more and more. Retailers can be publishers. Publishers can become retailers. It’s a vertical integration of the chain in a sense.

(2018)

Meanwhile, big magazine and newspaper brands are reorganising to deal with declining print revenue and to find new ways of being consumed – and funded – online. Smaller, niche magazines appear to be flourishing as print publications start to find their place as a quality, curated offering rather than a mass-market mail-out. And while Vogue is contracting in the United States and Europe, it is undergoing rapid expansion on a global scale, with new issues launched in the Middle East, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Greece, and Hong Kong in the space of two years.

All this means a greater diversity in the voices being heard in fashion and the creative talent involved in it. This can cause anxiety, as we shall see, but is heralded by many as a shaking-up of an industry that was notoriously difficult to get into.

Part of Charmaine Ayden’s job in PR involves finding suitable influencers to create digital content for brands. She argues: ‘There are many creatives who wouldn’t have had a platform if it wasn’t for social media. It’s making it more accessible and diverse’ (2019).

And Andrew Nagy, content director at GQ Middle East, says some of the most striking talent now is outside the mainstream media:

The amount of opportunities that people have now to create content is fantastic. They’re influencers, they’re video makers, they’re photo-journalists, and they can be incredibly popular and professional. But these days they’re making money working for themselves. They don’t necessarily care about working with brands such as GQ and Esquire anymore … they can create their own brand and be successful on their own terms.

(2019)

Journalism and ‘content’

The word ‘content’ has cropped up several times so far, and is worth tackling head on before we go any further. ‘Content’ is a catch-all term which appears to have grown up alongside digital convergence, and can refer to anything from video, audio, a blog or social media post, to a piece of brand marketing, imagery, or a long-form journalistic feature.

Some old-school editors are horrified at journalism being lumped in with all the rest, especially when they are extolling the exclusive benefits of their preferred medium. For example, Alexandra Shulman wrote in a pointed opinion article entitled ‘What Makes a Great Magazine Editor?’ after she stepped down as editor of British Vogue: ‘In the main, magazines are still creating the strongest images and articles around (please let’s not bundle them as “content”)’ (2017).

But it will be the approach of this book to consider content in all its forms as worthy of attention, while also highlighting any specific characteristics of journalism. There are various reasons for this.

Firstly – online, at least – journalism is just another piece of content. Journalists know how many years of training and experience they have had, how many hours of research went into their work, and the resources at their disposal. But the truth is that their stories have no special status online. Instead they have to compete for attention in people’s social media feeds along with all the other posts from friends, families, brands, and bloggers.

The new breed of editors accepts this state of affairs. Queennie Yang, former editor (Asia) at Vogue International, now China editorial director of The Business of Fashion, acknowledges:

Nowadays the challenge for the media is that everyone can be your competitor – anyone. Anyone can be a creator. We are not just competing with media, we are competing with celebrity itself. And games, and TV shows, everything. We are competing for time – who can get the readers’ time.

(2019)

This is heightened by the fact that we rarely come across a newspaper or a magazine as a package online, as we do in print. How often do we go directly to a website homepage to browse whatever is on offer? More often, search results and social media serve us up a single article.

So each article or post has to stand on its own merits, regardless of the brand or the resources behind it. Whether you find this terrifying or exhilarating will depend very much on which part of the industry you’re coming from.

Adam Tinworth, an online journalist and digital publishing strategist, says:

This is quite a mind shift for most journalists, who will be used to writing things that exist as part of a package of content. Online, you have to sell everything article by article, in the sense of finding an audience.

(2019)

Secondly, a common objection to the phrase ‘content’ is that it muddies the waters around editorial and paid-for posts, i.e., between an article produced by a journalist based on what they feel is interesting or inspiring for the public to see, and a post put out by a brand, PR or paid influencer for commercial purposes.

But I would argue that the waters are already muddied, in journalism as elsewhere. Many of the journalists I spoke to for this second edition are routinely involved in producing ‘branded content’ – editorial-style pieces financed by and coordinated with brands.

While newspapers and magazines have always done ‘advertorial’ (as branded content used to be called), it was a function of advertising rather than editorial staff. That changed with the emergence of digital-first publications, which were much less squeamish about asking journalists to work directly with brands.

Frankie Graddon said this was a steep learning curve for her when she went from a traditional editorial role at the Telegraph to fashion and beauty editor at The Pool website, but that she learned to appreciate it.

Having that editorial head and being able to simultaneously communicate a brand’s message – that’s such a brilliant skill to have. You can’t help thinking that this is the way things are going to head.

(2018)

This has now spread to the glossies. Naomi Pike, Vogue writer and editor of Miss Vogue, says: ‘Branded content has always been a big part of it since I’ve been here’ (2019).

What is more, fashion journalists like Pike are now being paid by brands to put out promotional content on their personal social media channels, thanks to the influence that working for Vogue is thought to bestow. She says:

I did my first influencer project outside Vogue this year, with Nike. That was new. And it was kind of new for Vogue as well – there have been some editors who’ve done bits and bobs, but for it to come through to a junior member of staff, it felt quite new and the way that things are going.

(2019)

In the end, then, ‘content’ is a useful phrase to capture the swirl of posts, articles, videos,...