Op-Ed: New Media, Old Problems

The likes of social media-first media entities like Style Not Com and I Deserve Couture are hailed as upending the status quo, but what do they actually say, if anything?

“It’s literally NOTHING,” fumed an established photographer on our shared taxi ride during this past men’s Paris fashion week, echoing a sentiment I had heard more than a few times from fashion insiders over the past several months. He was referring to Style Not Com, an Instagram account that documents fashion. Founded by Beka Gvishiani, a Georgian native living in Paris, it broadcasts fashion commentary to its 188 thousand followers. Though to call what Style Not Com produces “commentary” would be a stretch — for the most part the account provides a retelling of what most people with Internet access can see with their own eyes. To wit, on Rihanna’s recent Super Bowl appearance — “Rihanna, Loewe, Alaia.” Such snackable content comes in an attractive visual package — white san serif font on a cobalt blue background. The blue, repeated ad nauseam, has beсome a trademark; whenever Gvishiani is out and about fashion events, he is easy to spot by his ever-present “Style Not Com” baseball cap that advertises him to others.

The fashion industry has taken to Style Not Com with gusto. And he is not the only one. Quite a bit of ink has been spilled in the media over the so-called new generation of fashion media, that includes Instagram accounts like I Deserve Couture. Some have boldly proclaimed them as “the new critics.” I Deserve Couture began as a fashion meme account, run out of Florida by its founder Hanan Besovic, that often pointed out fashion’s absurdities. But as he began getting attention from brands like Fendi and Moschino, Besovic has become increasingly self-absorbed.

As these social media accounts gain followers and attention their operators have also acquired a new level of assertiveness, increasingly clamoring for fashion show invitations and other forms of access to fashion’s power structures. The narrative they use is that of democratization of access. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we have been here a generation ago when bloggers squared off with fashion magazines. The irony of the aforementioned photographer’s verdict on Style Not Com is that at one time he had also had to come up against the so-called gatekeepers. In 2010, T-Magazine, a lifestyle publication by the New York Times, published an article by the esteemed fashion critic Suzy Menkes that took aim at “bloggers” — a loose term that encompassed self-published fashion writers, street-style photographers, and outfit-changing influencers — blaming them for the “fashion circus” outside of the shows.

Bombarded with accusations of gatekeeping, Menkes had to walk back her comments. But lost in the backlash was Menkes’s real objection, which had to do with the degradation of discourse about fashion in general. Menkes came from a milieu in which fashion engendered commentary with an intellectual bent, which gave fashion the gravitas that any cultural discipline demands if it is to be taken seriously.

Menkes and other fashion journalists scoffed at how easily the bloggers were bought off, with a free bag, a store credit, or a press trip. They saw bloggers as uninformed impostors who were not qualified to speak authoritatively about fashion. What they failed to mention is that by the time the bloggers came about the magazines had dug their own grave by dumbing down content and voluntarily ceding all pretense to authority. 

Over the past several decades the mainstream glossy magazines from publishers like Hearst and Condé Nast have gone from intelligent publications for women to sponsored compendiums documenting the fashion-celebrity industrial complex. Gone were the days of Truman Capote publishing stories in Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar, of the novelist Kingsley Amis expounding on the social aspects of beauty on the pages of British Vogue, and of Elle publishing the first version of Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. Instead, the stories have shifted to puff pieces about American celebrities and the gardens of the British aristocracy. Meanwhile, their show reviews went from thought-provoking to banal and photo shoots began to resemble advertorials. It is no wonder then that some bloggers were able to go toe to toe with the magazines in terms of influence. If all women got from the magazines were instructions on what to wear, well, they could get the same from bloggers, who seemed more human, and therefore relatable.

Meanwhile, the bloggers, aided by the Internet’s newly minted self-publishing tools, seized on the newly found “gatekeeping” and “democratization” narratives with great success. They began securing front row seats at fashion shows while the street style photographers were hired by big brands for professional gigs. 

That story is still, surprisingly, alive and well, as witnessed by the recent kerfuffle over editors calling out influencers who got their own little front row playground at the last Gucci show (in the media corner, Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times, and Lisa Armstrong of the Telegraph; in the OG influencer corner, Bryan Boy and Susie Bubble). 

But what we are also witnessing is a new version of that same story, one in which the old influencer guard is being encroached on by the newcomers. The OG street style photographers are slowly hanging up their spurs, their rates undercut by the young camera-wielding kids that now seem to outnumber show attendees. The bloggers, some of whom, like Susie Bubble (Susanna Lau), actually can write and have gone on to securing editorial positions, are being challenged by the image-first culture that no longer prizes words. They are up against a new generation of kids whose audiences want memes and TikTok videos. That old journalistic complaint that the newcomers lack authority with which to tackle the subject they present is true. What is also true is that they no longer need it.

Who wins and who loses here? Fashion. It wins because fashion brands have always loved cheerleaders and loathed critics, and because sycophants with large audiences are good for sales. It loses because entities such as Style Not Com — who now has a book out (a book about what, one can’t help wondering) — continue to degrade the discourse around fashion. What is lost when informed opinion no longer counts is the implicit demand that fashion must do better. Designers who made fashion exciting, and therefore interesting, read the critics and felt this pressure. When the critics are replaced by pliant cheerleaders, that pressure is gone. We have never seen so much fashion as we do now, and it has never felt so boring. And herein lies the danger, that excitement about fashion is on its way out.