CHLOE MAGAZINE
F
ASHION
demoCRACY
For all fashion devotees out there, with your personal style blogs and well-curated Tumblrs, with your
up-and-coming designer duds and five-digit Instagram follower count, imagine a time when print
publications and magazines had nothing to do with the digital world.
words by Jay De Belen
Imagine a fashion world without Style.com, with no abundance
of runway photos, lookbooks, and street style shots. Imagine
the non-existence of Twitter, Instagram and all the social media
we use to keep in the sartorial loop. Imagine the absence of the
blogger – not too long ago, there was a time when the Bryanboys, the Tavi Gevinsons and the Susie Bubbles of the world
didn’t crowd the front row. Instead, actual fashion elite preened
and posed, and reviewed collections. Fashion, simply based on
its origins, was not for everybody else, but the entitled. But,
fashion is now a democracy in this 21st century, whether we like
it or not.
One of the biggest factors leading up to the democratization
of fashion is the rise of the fashion blogger. And I don’t just
mean the aforementioned sponsored bigwigs. Included in this
theoretically infinite digital social circle is every single person
with access to their own blog, regardless of size, scope and audience. Publishing through the click of a button is a godsend to
anybody with any sort of opinion, be it a well-researched and
thoughtful think piece or a poorly-written one paragraph review.
Everybody is a critic in the 21st century. Now that fashion has
moved away from its supposed elitism and into the pop culture
stream, bastardization and miscommunication is eventual.
Though blogger Bryanboy (born Bryan Grey Yambao, in the
Philippines) draws criticism every time he steps out and gets
snapped by the street style photographers crowding the fashion shows, he is a solid example of how fashion is brought to
the masses. Despite his supposed upper echelon upbringing,
Bryanboy and his persona are by definition, a part of the masses.
He was an outsider looking in, and as time passed, his outsider
perspective became a necessity. It must be noted that many of
his stylized fashion portraits include pieces lent, given and spon-
sored by brands wanting to cash in on his relevance. It’s strange
to think that the trailblazers of the industry, designers and directors and such, resort to appeasing a blogger’s personal needs.
Nevertheless, globalization is making the world a much smaller
place, the fashion industry included. Since fashion’s visuals,
knowledge and information are essentially laid out for audiences
to see, the next step would be to waltz into the buyer’s hand.
The digital age has brought about ease of purchasing, a reaction
and product of consumerism. At the click of a button, anybody
can purchase a piece of clothing through their desktop or cellphones. Because of this, the fashion industry instantly translates
from being available to the elite, to everybody. Before, whoever
could afford to access luxury brands were the ones able to purchase them. Now, at the click of a button, anybody can acce 70