Chloe Spring/Summer 2012 show at Jardins des Tuileries, Paris | Photo: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom — It’s hard to believe 2011 is coming to a close. It’s been an action packed year in the business of fashion. From the rise of digital to the fall of Galliano, and everything in between, BoF has found itself exploring the heart of an ever-changing fashion ecosystem, fuelled by creativity, digital innovation and globalisation.

We are grateful to all of the fashion visionaries, entrepreneurs and professionals who have shared their stories with us over the past year, offering us lessons from fashion’s front-lines. Their insights have sparked conversations here on BoF, across the social web, and in boardrooms, classrooms and studios all over the world. Thank you to everyone for your continued support and interest in BoF.

As the year comes to a close, it’s time for us to take a break. The BoF team will be off until 3 January, 2012. Until then, to whet your appetites for 2012, we look back the defining BoF stories in 2011.

Happy holidays to everyone!

1. The Business of Blogging

Scott Schuman | Photo: Garance Doré

Bloggers’ businesses have been garnering headlines in the mainstream media in recent months, but BoF has been exploring the business models emerging from the fashion blogosphere since 2007. This year, we launched a series of in-depth interviews with some of the world’s leading fashion bloggers, revealing that there is as much variety in their approaches to business as there is in the ways they express themselves online. The Business of Blogging series was by far the most shared and discussed content on BoF this year. Our interview with The Sartorialist Scott Schuman alone has been viewed more than 80,000 times.

The Business of Blogging | The Sartorialist

The Business of Blogging | Elin King

The Business of Blogging | Susie Bubble

The Business of Blogging | Tommy Ton

The Business of Blogging | Bag Snob

2. Trouble with iPad Magazines

Vanity Fair’s June 2011 iPad Issue | Source: Vanity Fair

Magazines have jumped into the iPad fray with gusto, but how are they succeeding in creating a digital magazine experience that is genuinely new? Our managing editor Vikram Kansara investigates.

3. Fashion PR in the Digital Age

YSL Tweet Denying Pilati Rumours | Source: Twitter

In the speedy new world of fashion communication, PR’s operate in an ‘always-on’ viral world where rumours can spread faster than ever before and new fashion communities are springing up everyday. BoF talks to the fashion industry’s leading PR agencies about their strategies for managing communication in the digital age.

4. Finding the Luxury in Mass Customisation 

Prada SS11 Lace-Up Project | Source: Prada

Could new technologies help to revive one of the original tenets of luxury? The rise of a new mode of production called “mass customisation” promises to restore individuality to the product design process, bringing a variety of new personalised product experiences to consumers.

5. Social Curation Start-ups Target Fashion Industry

Lyst Screenshot | Source: Lyst

Filtering content through recommendations from our friends and colleagues has become an important way of sorting through all the noise. Now, a gr0up of innovative social curation startups are providing a new way to discover and enjoy content, and are attracting investor attention. Since our report in April, Pinterest raised $37m in funding with a valuation greater than $200m, and The Fancy, received a $10m investment from PPR, valuing the business at $100m.

6. The French Contemporary Wave That’s Reshaping Ready-To-Wear

Couples from The Kooples ad campaigns | Source: The Kooples

Over the past couple of years, a slew of French contemporary brands including Sandro, Maje, The Kooples and Zadig & Voltaire have attempted to conquer London and New York, two of the most competitive retail landscapes on the planet. Is contemporary pricing the future of a failing ready-to-wear model that’s increasingly out of sync with consumer expectations and budgets?

7. How Commercial Content is Changing Editorial

Mr Porter Screenshot | Source: Mr Porter

It seems that there are almost weekly reports announcing that yet another magazine veteran has fled a traditional publishing company to take up a position at a brand or retailer. BoF guest contributor Ken Miller explores the implications of  the content-meets-commerce fashion fusion.

8. The Long View | How Realtime Data is Reshaping the Fashion Business

Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts | Source: Editd

EDITd is the London-based start-up whose real-time analytics of social data serve up predictions on trends, colours and silhouettes in the seasons to come. BoF sat down with founders Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts to learn more.

9. BoF Exclusive | Style.com to Launch Magazine and ‘Dip Toes’ in E-Commerce

Dirk Standen, Editor-in-Chief, Style.com | Photo: Style.com/Lexie Moreland

We’ve all seen print media go digital, but when digital goes print, you know something interesting is happening in fashion media. I spoke to Dirk Standen, editor-in-chief of Style.com, in a BoF Exclusive on the launch of Style.com Print magazine.

10. Introducing the Calgary bag and Crowdsourcing Experiment with Bill Amberg

The Calgary bag panorama | Photo: Bill Amberg

And last but not least, the Calgary bag, a collaboration and crowd-sourcing project with leather goods craftsman Bill Amberg, sparked a huge reaction amongst the BoF community, with people from all over the world weighing in on the merits (and demerits) of fashion crowdsourcing, and revealing some interesting results in the process. The Calgary bag has now sold out twice on BillAmberg.com and more are due in early next year.

Imran Amed is founder and editor-in-chief of The Business of Fashion

Scott Schuman | Photo: Garance Doré

Scott Schuman’s rise to international blogging fame is well known, but until now he has never discussed his business model in detail. In our latest instalment of The Business of Blogging, BoF gets the exclusive on how The Sartorialist makes bank

PARIS, France — With high-profile campaigns for Burberry and DKNY Jeans, a best-selling book, and a place on TIME magazine’s 2007 list of Top 100 Design Influencers, Scott Schuman is the streetstyle blogger that paved the way for hundreds of others who have followed in his trailblazing footsteps. For the fashion flock, being shot for The Sartorialist website is still the ultimate badge of honour.

But Mr. Schuman’s influence is felt far beyond the blogosphere. His beautifully framed photos, which feature fashion insiders and football fans alike, now appear on mood boards in design studios around the world. His photographic style has inspired countless advertising campaigns and editorials.

This week, as he celebrates his blog’s sixth anniversary, traffic numbers are spiking. The Sartorialist had around 13 million page views last month, a 44 percent increase over the same month last year, something Schuman attributes to a recent site redesign for which he manually re-tagged more than five years of posts himself, enabling visitors to more easily search his growing archive.

This could turn out to be a particularly savvy investment of time and money. If current traffic levels are sustained and significant portion of the advertising inventory on The Sartorialist is sold, it could theoretically make Scott Schuman fashion’s first million dollar a year blogger.

According to Mr. Schuman, The Sartorialist was originally inspired by Brooklyn-based writer Grace Bonney’s interior design blog Design*Sponge. “I could tell she was doing it by herself and I liked the idea that she was having an interaction,” he said. “She had like 30 comments on a post and I thought that was really cool.” Schuman decided to start a similar blog for fashion after examining a series of photos he had taken of a few stylish guys in New York’s Fulton fish market while on a photography course.

Since these beginnings, the fashion industry has witnessed an explosion of ‘front-row’ fashion bloggers, something that has not always pleased Schuman, at least not at first. Last week, a controversial interview with Schuman was published, showing Schuman’s apparent disdain for some of his much younger blogging peers. “I’ve kind of changed my mind [about that],” he told BoF, looking back with some contrition and pointing out that the interview in question is more than 18 months old. “With everybody, our relationships have really evolved. As I got to know Bryanboy and Tavi more, I’ve come to respect their seriousness of it. It’s a struggle to try and build [something] and still maintain who you are.”

But even if he is now more at ease with his blogging brethren, from the beginning Schuman understood the value of strategically associating himself with the mainstream fashion media, who took interest in his photographic style. “There were no important blogs at that time, so [I needed] to saddle up with someone to get that stamp of approval,” he explained. “The very first season, Style.com called me. They took a chance and said ‘Why don’t you [cover the shows] for us?’ They didn’t pay me very much money, but I give them credit for just taking that chance.”

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Style.com was the internet place to be; GQ was the men’s magazine to be [in],” he said. “The one thing that really helped was that I really took full advantage of every opportunity I was given. I worked my ass off, posting every night on my blog and Style.com. I remember the first time I went to Milan I had four meals in five days because I just didn’t stop. I had to get to the shows.”

But once The Sartorialist began to attract serious global attention, Schuman left these high-profile gigs behind to focus on building his own business. With his newfound independence, Schuman knew he would have to build out his own revenue streams. “You have to constantly spread out your streams, so if one stream starts to dry up you can go on,” he said. “The only stream coming in the beginning was working with GQ and Style.com.”

In 2008, James Danziger called. His eponymous gallery in New York hosted an exhibition for Schuman, selling his prints as “increasingly accomplished works of art in their own right,” according to the gallery’s website. The exhibit was an instant success, selling more than fifty prints at prices ranging from $1500 to $4000 each. But this proved not to be a stable source of income, said Schuman. “You don’t do an exhibit every year, so you’re constantly asking yourself how am I going to make that money next year?”

Mr. Schuman began thinking about his blog more deeply. “At the very beginning I had to decide: do I want this to be a blog about fashion, or do I want it to be an artistic photographic thing? I kept going back and forth. At some point I think I finally decided that I didn’t want to be a magazine. I decided to take a more photographic route.”

Schuman cites as inspiration the photography of documentary style cameramen like National Geographic’s Steve McCurry, the man behind the now-famous June 1985 cover photo featuring an Afghani girl with haunting sea green eyes. Looking at Schuman’s photos, you can sense that he is trying to capture the inner spirit of his subjects, not only their fashion sense. “I’m not reporting on a bag; who’s carrying what bag and who’s wearing what dress. I’m not reporting on people,” he explained. “What I am looking for is a certain grace.”

Schuman frowns upon the idea of putting a price on posts that appear in his content feed. “What I don’t like is advertorial posts that are under the table. When I did the Burberry thing – it’s Burberry, a humongous company with such control – and yet I shot that whole thing just like I would shoot everything,” he said, referring to his work for the British megabrand’s “Art of the Trench” social media campaign. We cast some of the people, we got people from the blog. Some people had their own Burberry coats, some people we gave them. I was very proud, so I shot 100 of them and I picked nine that I really loved [and said to my readers] ‘Here is the link to this Burberry project that I did.’”

Schuman has also worked on a product collaboration with American skin, hair, and body care brand Kiehl’s, creating a dopp kit with a variety of Kiehl’s products in exchange for a fixed fee. “We had Luca Roda manufacture it in Italy. As I was a stay-at-home Dad, I really wanted to push this Father’s Day thing. So, we went to the park where I took my kids, where I learnt photography, [and] we got 10 dads to run around with their kids and said ‘We want to take pictures of you having fun with your kids,’ and those were the photographs that we got. So, I wrote something very heartfelt [on my blog] about what it was like to be a stay-at-home Dad.”

At first, Schuman hesitates when asked whether he was contractually obligated to write about the Kiehl’s collaboration on his blog, but then offers: “I’m the one that pitched it in. I’m the one who said I wanted it to be about Father’s Day. It was because of me. I wanted to do this photo thing. So it was part of the contract because I wanted to do it. It was a fun process.”

Of course, like other photo bloggers, Schuman also sells his images to magazines, through his agent, Jedroot. But by far his biggest (and most stable) source of revenue now comes from ad sales on The Sartorialist website. Initially, Schuman worked with Style.com to sell his advertising inventory, but has taken this function back in-house, explaining that he is in a much better position to sell the ads himself because he understands the website better than anyone else could.

“I’ve been doing the ads for me and Garance for the last year,” he said, referring to his girlfriend Garance Doré, another superstar blogger, known for her illustrations, writing and photography. “Just like it took me forever to learn photography, it took me forever to learn how to sell [ads] like real agencies” on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, instead of the monthly sponsorship or affiliate commission models used by many other independent fashion blogs.

“American Apparel and Net-a-Porter came from Style.com and they were just buying a month [of ads] for a flat amount of money. But I didn’t think that was right and I knew that’s not how we were going to grow. We were going to have to talk the talk like everybody else. We couldn’t just say ‘Oh, we’re just a little blog.’ If we’re going to make a business here, we’ve got to talk their language.”

And talk their language he does. Schuman rattles off digital media lingo with ease, speaking fluently about ‘geo-targeting’ and digital ad unit dimensions. He declined to reveal his exact CPM rate, but said that it has been increasing steadily over time, going above the thirty dollar range for the most valuable inventory. “People would tell me all these crazy numbers and say ‘It’s premium, it should be way up here,’” he said, motioning to the ceiling. “But like anything, you start out at a price where people are willing to buy. It doesn’t help to have a $40 CPM if nobody’s buying it,” he said.

But at his current traffic levels, even with a $20 CPM and only 50 percent of total inventory sold, Schuman could theoretically earn over $100,000 per month on advertising alone, easily earning him more than a million dollars of revenue per year from advertisers that now include blue chip luxury brands like Tiffany, Coach, and Ferragamo. Removing some nominal overheads and salaries, this makes for a very profitable niche media business.

And then of course, there’s his best-selling book, The Sartorialist, published by Penguin in September 2009, which has sold over 100,000 copies. “It did good,” said Schuman with a smile, expressing his surprise at the success of the book, for which he earned a six-figure advance against royalties. He received two royalty cheques on top of the advance within the first year of publishing. “I was shocked I even got one,” he says.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise however that Schuman has another book up his sleeve. “Now the process is much easier, because I know how to approach it. And Penguin is very excited.” With the current book still selling briskly, Penguin is waiting for the right time to publish Schuman’s next book, which could be published as early as 2012.

“You can really make a living out of this,” said Schuman emphatically. “It’s tough, but if you work really hard you can create a business, if you’re smart about it and have something real to say.”

Imran Amed is founder and editor of The Business of Fashion

Joyce 40th anniversary multi-sensory exhibition | Source: Dazed Digital

The Joys of Joyce (Dazed Digital)
“Joyce was a pioneer which was the first to bring international designers such as Givenchy, Lanvin, Margiela, and Fendi, amongst other luxury names, to Asia. To celebrate their 40th anniversary, Joyce has specially commissioned works of over 50 designers.”

5000th Zara store: Inditex embraces eco-fashion (Fashion United)
“Showing off its real aim to embrace the latest eco-trends from top to bottom… Inditex has just opened its 5000th Zara store as the flagship of its 2011-2015 Sustainable Inditex Plan.”

Giovanni Bedin Revitalizes a Heritage Brand (WSJ)
“Charged with meeting the lofty standard set by the brand’s legendary founder, Charles Frederick Worth, Mr. Bedin is simultaneously determined to pursue the modern.”

Finding Inspiration with The Sartorialist (NY Times)
“Regularly visiting The Sartorialist, a picture blog created by Scott Schuman, is akin to a serendipiter’s journey with a guide whose eye for detail, gift for framing and hopeful outlook help you see how many beautiful people there are.”

Sci-fashion (FT)
“The fusion of fashion and science as [serves] to expose science to more worldly thinking outside the lab, while at the same time allowing fashion to stop relying on ‘periods of history’ and look forward instead.”

Vogue editor Wintour critiques Letterman’s socks (AP)
“Wintour, making her first appearance on CBS’ “Late Show,” made light of her image as an imperious and tough boss, but acknowledged that she is direct with her staff. “Well, I’m very decisive and I try and give very clear direction to the people that I’m working with, and sometimes, unfortunately, they don’t hear the answer that they would like to hear,” Wintour said.”

Online sales soar during July (Drapers)
“Online sales surged to £4.2bn in July as shoppers showed signs of renewed confidence. According to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, July recorded around 15.7% more online sales than June, a 16.8% year-on-year rise.”

Prada quashes speculation it is seeking a partner (Drapers)
“A spokesman for the Italian fashion house said “there are no talks with anyone” following speculation Prada’s banks were seeking a partner to take a 30% slice of the group.”

Where the streets have no shame (Salon.com)
“The Sartorialist blog is an ever-evolving pictorial essay on the distinction between personal style and mere fashion. The former is a living, breathing element; the rest is just clothes. At last a selection of Schuman’s best images have been collected in one place, a book called, simply enough, The Sartorialist.”

NEW YORK, United States – Openly spreading the latest fashion gospel to an uninitiated crowd has always been anathema to the fashion elite. Until recently, this required fashion media to work a delicate balance between informing the mass public of the latest trends without being too direct as to make those new trends over-exposed and passé.

The internet — web 2.0 media and blogs, in particular — has been kicking down doors and fostering greater inclusion in most cultural fields. With fashion, the net has created unprecedented opportunities for fashion pedagogy, making old media look decidedly old-school.

So what’s an old media brand to do in this new environment? Men’s fashion bible GQ has responded with a web-offshoot called GQ Rules, possibly the greatest experiment in mass fashion teaching ever attempted.

Up until recently, good advice about menswear on the Internet was rare. Then, sites like The Sartorialist appeared, creating new interest in the way real men around the world are dressing, thereby dragging the leading edge of menswear away from fantastical and abstract magazine spreads and onto the reality of the streets. Thanks to Scott Schuman’s discerning eye, his genuine relationship with his readership, and fiery debate in the comments section, the site makes for engaging, addictive reading and even manages to teach a thing or two.

GQ Rules is an apparent response to both the proliferation of independent menswear fashion sites on the Internet as well as to the seemingly-record high interest in menswear at the moment. GQ Rules Director and producer Andrew Comer, however, does not see this as anything new: “GQ has been a reference point for men for over fifty years. We see GQ Rules as a logical extension of our longstanding mission.”

True to his word and GQ’s heritage, the new site sharpens its age-old message of proper gentlemanly style, while introducing its editors and philosophy to a whole new generation of men. Over the course of one month and under the tagline “How to Become a Well-Dressed Rebel in 30 Days,” Style Editor Adam Rapoport, Creative Director Jim Moore, and “Style Guy” Glenn O’Brien offer a daily three-minute video teaching the basics of men’s style. Viewers learn how to wear suits more casually with Band of Outsiders’ Scott Sternberg, how to style T-shirts with Gap’s Patrick Robinson, and how to pull off eccentric pocket squares with Derrick Miller from Barker Black.

Although nominally focused on “basics,” a few segments go off into extremely au courant specifics, which may leave some non-fashion types scratching their heads. Thom Browne personally introduces the concept of suited socklessness, and the editors also try to convince viewers that Patagonia down vests make perfect sense over wool suits.

The result has been an active and vibrant dialogue. GQ Rules videos have received thousands of comments — sometimes within minutes of posting, thanks in part to special promotion that allows participants to win a special gift card from J. Crew. This is a long way from the past, when magazines like GQ could create a monolithic direction on style without any rebuttals on the same page.

“The comments are both for other readers (to interact with one another about these topics) and for us (to learn, just as we would from print “letters to the editor”), says Comer.  “And we don’t shy away from disagreement—it’s not about consensus. It’s about engaging with our readers.”

Perhaps the comments were even too successful: who wants to sift through 4,100 one-sentence quips to find possible pearls of wisdom from peers? For future versions of GQ Rules, some functionality to provide peer-ratings on the most useful comments, as is seen on sites like Trip Advisor and YouTube, would help to make sure the cream of the comments rises to the top.

On the whole, however, GQ Rules is an excellent case study of how old media can embrace new media, by adding meaningful and useful content to the mix. After watching an entire month of these videos, studious newbies should possess the vocabulary and base knowledge to make informed fashion decisions and avoid common pitfalls.

What’s more, the site may be the warmest welcome ever for new consumers interested in high-end and hot indie fashion brands. With chic, yet accessible Adam Rapoport at the helm, even non-”fashion guys” can find an opening into cutting-edge style. Maybe they won’t go for ankle “cleavage” at first but they may learn to wear a scarf and wear the right kind of sneakers with a suit. 

Best of all, GQ Rules also proves a very important lesson about the current state of menswear: anything goes. In the videos we see American trad, British looks, Milano style, dapper Southern dandyism, and laid-back New York hipster cool all presented as acceptable options.

Individuality is all in the balance.

W. David Marx is a Contributing Editor of The Business of Fashion and Chief Editor of MEKAS. Photo and video courtesy of GQ and men.style.com.

In the run-up to the Easter long weekend, which has already begun here in London, we thought we’d share some our new favourites for lazy Sunday reading from the ever expanding fashion  and business blogosphere.

JC Report
Not technically a blog, but now presented in a blog format, JC Report is one of the leading online authorities for thoughtful fashion content on the cutting edge. We’ve been working with Jason Campbell, JC Report’s charismatic founder, on restructuring the JCR value proposition, launching a newly designed site, and engaging JCR’s truly global fashion community. We’re delighted with the results: daily news, editorial and intelligence that you can’t find anywhere else.  The latest issue, released yesterday, features a denim hunter from London, shopping in Kuala Lumpur, and the masculine tailoring trend sweeping through the A/W women’s collections. For the next month, the JC Report site is being curated by photographer Miguel Villalobos. Congratulations to Jason and his team.

Wear Palettes
Who isn’t a fan of the Sartorialist? Well now, you can take things one step further to understand why Scott Schuman’s photos always seem to hit the right notes — colour notes, that is. Wear Palettes takes some of The Sartorialist’s best photos and distills the underlying colour palettes that make his photos so striking.

Tom Fishburne
During our time in business school, we were constantly entertained by the insightful cartoons by one of our enigmatic classmates which appeared in the student newspaper. I don’t know Tom personally, but came across his blog the other day, which provides clever insights in marketing and branding through the powerful medium of the cartoon.

Cartoon courtesy of Tom Fishburne and photos courtesy of JC Report, the Sartorialist, and Wear Palettes.

We have recently become addicted to a series of videos from TED — or, Technology, Entertainment and Design — an annual conference where passionate people descend on Monterrey, California to listen to other passionate people, each of whom are given 18 minutes to give the talk of their lives. The idea is that the best ideas will spread, by sheer virtue of the combined influence of all of the mavens and connectors in the room.

The notion of the idea virus also happens to be at the core of Seth Godin’s expertise. Godin gave this prescient talk at TED in February 2003 and declared to the world’s leading thinkers: "No matter what we do for a living, we’re in the fashion business!" 

What he  is getting at is that we in the fashion business know that it is the most remarkable ideas gain attention –  and every six months we are on the lookout for the freshest visions of how people want to dress and live today. Sometimes this may mean borrowing ideas from a different era and making them relevant for now. Nicholas Ghesquiere, a fashion innovator whose ideas influence both his high-falutin peers and the mass market alike, is a perfect example of this.

Godin also says marketing today is "not about interrupting people with full page ads," but this is a lesson that the fashion industry still needs to learn. Just flip through any fashion magazine and witness our worship of the full page glossy ad, even at a time when a recommendation from Susie Bubble, photograph from The Sartorialist, or endorsement from The Manolo can have much more weight at no cost at all — and simply because you are creating remarkable products.

While we suspect there will always be a role for advertising in the fashion business, smart fashion brands are also focusing on delivering a remarkable product that will get fashion people talking.

WWD reports today that Style.com has concluded an agreement to sell advertising on the Sartorialist blog maintained by Scott Schuman, a former fashion industry staffer who left a fashion sales showroom to create one of the best known blogs in the fashion blogosphere.

Women’s Wear Daily said:

A fashion label may get the best endorsement when its wares show up on a well-dressed city dweller photographed for fashion industry veteran Scott Schuman’s popular blog The Sartorialist. But for those who want more direct brand promotion, Style.com and Men.style.com will begin to sell ads forThesartorialist.blogspot.com beginning Sept. 1….

…The partnership is the first time the CondéNet properties have sold ads for a brand outside the company stable. Schuman’s blog, where he posts commentary on stylish men and women on the street, attracts more than one million unique visitors a month. He also pens a regular column for GQ and guest-blogs on Men.style.com and Style.com. "The Sartorialist reaches the person who really cares about fashion as a form of self-expression. He chronicles very chic people and his constituency are the people he photographs," said Dee Salomon, senior vice president of CondéNet. The site seeks to attract upscale automotive and consumer electronics as well as fashion brands. Style.com and Men.style.com and The Sartorialist will share advertising revenue generated from the blog. — WWD, 16 July 2007

This is, of course yet another sign of the increasing importance of fashion blogs as a communication vehicle for fashion brands, and it was smart of Scott to partner with CondeNet, who understand his demographic and who already have the advertiser relationships in place to generate ad sales.

Yet, having "upscale automotive and consumer electronics" ads next to Scott’s  eye-catching photos does raise some questions. Will they ruin the clean lines, aesthetic simplicity and fashion purity of the site?  Methinks it will be best to keep the ads focused on fashion and integrate them as cleanly as possible into Scott’s site, so as to maintain the integrity of what the Sartorialist’s 1 million monthly visitors are interested in: the photography.

Photo clip courtesy of Scott Schuman.

Fashion blogging
Any regular readers of this blog know that I have been a big fan of the Sartorialist, aka Scott Schuman, since I first came across his site almost two years ago. His was the first blog of any sort to really catch my attention because there was something really powerful about seeing clothes that are styled by real people on the street. It brings the clothes to life in a way that high-fashion editorial sometimes cannot.  FT does a great video profile of Scott that allows you to see how The Sartorialist came to be, explains how Scott thinks about his work and reveals that The Sartorialist is now receiving over 1.3 million page views per month. [You can see my own Sartorialist moment here]

The Sartorialist blog also opened my eyes to the potential of what the democracy of blogging could do for a fashion business, particularly emerging businesses with limited profiles and advertising budgets.  What if, for example, you could mouse over a sweater you like in one of Scott’s photos and could discover who designed the sweater and where you could buy it online through phototagging (just like you can tag people in your photos on Facebook.com)? Its Fashion 2.0 folks and its only going to get more interesting.

There is a lot more discussion of the fashion blogosphere is in this video overview narrated by Jeanne Beker, highlighting the pros and cons of the fashion blogging phenomenon, which some say has resulted in a reported 2 million fashion blogs. Jeanne speaks to some of the world’s leading fashion critics  (Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, Kate Betts from Time magazine, and Colin McDowell from the Sunday Times) to get their views on what blogging has done for them. She also speakss to the (love-him-or-hate-him) blogstar Perez Hilton.

Tom Ford’s new store on Madison Avenue
FT also gives us a peek into the much-discussed Madison Avenue flagship recently opened by Tom Ford, and heavily criticised by some observers for being too exclusive and too expensive. Tom Ford gives Jeanne a personal tour of the store which provides some of Tom’s own thinking on what he was trying to accomplish with the store. Jeanne does go through the price points in the store, which are truly astronomical,  including personalised underwear for $75.

Mentoring emerging designers
When emerging designers talk to me about setting up their own businesses, I often encourage them to try to get some time working in the studio of an established design house first.  This video outlines the mentorship of young proteges including Yves Saint Laurent (mentored by Christian Dior) to Francisco Costa (mentored by Calvin Klein) to Narcisco Rodriguez (mentored by Donna Karan). You can see how some of the industry’s biggest names of today started their careers as apprentices to some of the biggest names from yesteryear.

© 2007 Copyright Imran Amed – The Business of Fashion. 
Scott Shuman photo courtesy of FT.

It was very smart of the NYT to supplement its traditional fashion coverage with this community concept through Horyn’s blog. It is the first successful execution I have seen on the NYT site to build a targeted community (read: loyal audience for advertisers) to take it beyond the transactional way most of us use to interact with news media. Instead of quickly digesting articles and then clicking somewhere else, readers are compelled to stay and engage each other in further discussion. This inevitably does lead to more clicks and return visits to the site, and much of it is driven through that oft-spoken-of concept of user-generated content.

I have been seeing this more and more on many news sites, including The Globe and Mail which enables comments for even its regular articles, through which sometimes hundreds of comments are posted. Style.com has also been working with the Sartorialist, who has a dedicated section on the site — though for some reason, people here don’t seem to be engaging as much — especially when compared to the passionate conversations on the Sartorialist’s own blog.

In a previous blog on the business of blogging, I spoke of how many fashion editors are being asked to write blogs in addition to their regular responsibilities. Not everyone is happy about it. But, having seen Horyn’s blog and the proliferation of new fashion content on the Internet, this seems to be the only way the traditional players are going to be able to keep up with the upstarts. However, it’s the old adage of "Content is King" that still prevails. Only so long as the content remains good will this strategy prevail. I look forward to seeing where Cathy takes the blog in the future.