The Online Tastemakers - Module 8

C2 Proficiency · Gapped Text · Expert Proficiency Resource Book, Pearson Education

You are going to read a newspaper article about the fashion industry. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (1–7). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

The Online Tastemakers

How bloggers changed the face of fashion marketing

And it didn't stop at incentives either. One high-end retailer reportedly even started holding workshops to give its key bloggers tips on how to make their blogs more shoppable, thereby ensuring that potential clients need look no further.

Celebrity weeklies were increasingly taking their cues from hot blogger stories and this one was picked up everywhere. What's more, it was not only blogs about celebrities that were having an impact. People writing about everything from watches to their own lives were becoming more influential.

In other words, the garment had gone viral. But the question remained: Did this occur because A-listers were shown wearing the item and consumers wanted to be just like them, or was it because key fashion bloggers picked, from the thousands of images they sift through each day, those particular pictures to feature?

Paradoxically, therefore, it became quite possible that their very success could ultimately be their undoing. In this, they were simply the latest iteration of a recurring theme: fashion's ability to identify, and co-opt, an influential minority.

Some from this earlier generation subsequently parlayed their fame into paid consultancies or jobs with brands. Unsurprisingly, given their many thousand followers, the brands loved them, and were keen to bring them into the fold.

Some retailers, many of them also etailers, started doing exactly that, zooming in on blogs in an attempt to facilitate sales at the point of inspiration. Potential customers were online every single moment of the day, and wherever they were, they were also shopping. Brands were trying to close the gap between seeing an item and buying it.

The emergence of such pseudo-blogs underlines a shift that was happening across the blogosphere at that time. There were still people doing it solo, but there were now many other blogs, owned by media companies and set up as digital platforms. In the world of celebrity fashion blogs, these included collective blogs reviewing celebrity style and directing viewers to retailer sites.

What's more, one prominent blogger believes commercial tie-ups are an inevitable result of blogging becoming, for some, a business. She says, 'As more and more of the most influential bloggers moved from blogging part-time to making it the main focus of their professional activity, they are necessarily looking for ways to monetise their influence in order to make a living.'

How you quantify real online influence remains a subject of much debate in the fashion industry. For many, however, the defining moment came back in 2011. The story began when a major US fashion chain store, known for colourful, funky pieces, sent a dress with navy and red stripes to a few celebrity friends. Coincidentally, and in the space of four weeks, all wore the dress in public. Before you could say, 'What a cute outfit', various blog sites had written about this sartorial mind meld. Within a week, the store had nearly sold out of the $49.90 item, which means that, according to the estimates of one industry expert, they had moved in excess of ten thousand dresses.

In the past, the correct interpretation would probably have been the former; it is received wisdom in the fashion industry that celebrities sell clothes. Yet some people are in no doubt that this was the moment when things changed. For these commentators, it was the bloggers who were behind that striped dress becoming so covetable.

These were not, however, necessarily the same bloggers who had first gained the fashion industry's attention a few years previously. Those were primarily fashion fans with laptops, embraced for their idiosyncratic take on fashion and invited to sit in the front row at catwalk events, the seats traditionally reserved for the powerful editors of glossy magazines.

The newer breed of bloggers was different. Focusing on red-carpet events and celebrities, they played into several contemporary trends: a fascination with famous people, especially reality TV stars; our desire to cut through large amounts of information quickly; and the ability of online sites to drive sales. For the most part, these blogs are distinguishable from the earlier wave because they've been conceived from the outset as commercial enterprises, albeit presented in the format of a blog.

The kind of business such referrals started to generate caused a shift in thinking at some fashion brands about the best way to reach consumers. When they blogged about people wearing things, they were adding another level of endorsement. Brands soon realised that rather than spend a huge amount on advertising and marketing, they'd be better off targeting the bloggers.

But with all this going on, how was an independent blogger to work more closely with a brand whilst simultaneously retaining what, for many, made them worth reading in the first place? That sense that bloggers are just like me, only more obsessive; that we respond to them as readers because we assume a purity in their approach; they are, we imagine, doing it for fun, not leveraging for profit?

Looking back, it is possible to see a familiar pattern emerging. It had happened with those who rejected fashion's rules (hippies, punks), just as it happened with those who wanted to be ironic and distant from fashion (Tom Ford's early Gucci) and it had already happened with the first wave of bloggers. At the end of the day, the fashion industry absorbed the trends and made them mainstream. For independent bloggers, the process started with that striped dress.

And this makes sense and it is something that blog followers, who are not so easily manipulated as might be supposed, can appreciate – in the same way that they can see when something is branded. At the end of the day, they could ask themselves the questions, 'Do you really want that dress because a particular blogger showed it to you and you liked the blog?' and 'Did the blogger show you that dress because the brand asked them to?'

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