BLOGGING: THE NEW BLACK

Story: Arylene Westlake
Photography: Kamel Lahmadi

Style bloggers have gone from being amateur fashion writers to powerful trend spotters, some even earning hundreds of thousands of dollars.

OUTSIDE the white tents in New York last week, fashion’s new breed of style-makers loitered on the steps of the Lincoln Center waiting their turn to capture the trendsetters at their best.

It’s a far cry from the days when the grandfather of street fashion, The New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, now 82, snapped the likes of Greta Garbo, hiding behind the upturned collar of her nutria coat, or socialite Gloria Vanderbilt and jewellery designer Paloma Picasso in their Sunday best outside the Tiffany store.

Now the gateway to each show teems with the paparazzi-style lenses of fashion bloggers and street fashion comes alive in blog pages and online picture spreads documenting the diversity of individual style.

Style is no longer the preserve of newspaper and magazine social and fashion pages featuring our most glamorous A-listers – instead the online world welcomes the arrival of the average clothes horse as he and she go about their daily business.

When 13-year-old Tavi Gevinson, of Style Rookie, emerged in 2009, the fashion set was charmed by her girlish understanding of haute couture. The rest of the world wondered how a Chicago teen could afford Miu Miu and Comme des Garçons…

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