Truly independent fashion journalism? About Fashion On Paper |

It was a good attempt, yet as all things arranged with great ideas in mind, too little money and too few contacts, it was imperfect and slightly unprofessional. I’m talking about “Fashion On Paper”, an event launched during AltaRomaAltaModa.

Conceived as a sort of fair of independent fashion publications, this event that closed yesterday at Rome’s Tempio di Adriano featured exhibitions, talks and special meetings with different professionals from the world of fashion.

Despite the basic idea was good, I think there were a few mistakes in organising this event: first and foremost there were very few independent magazines – among them Drama, Drome, Neo2, Rodeo and Standard Magazine – that couldn’t really represent the variety of independent fashion and style publications on an international level.

The second major mistake committed by the organisers was that maybe some publications or guests didn’t really have much to do with genuine independent publications.

Take last Saturday’s event, a talk about online and printed fashion journalism featuring Diane Pernet, The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman, Italian journalist Angelo Flaccavento and Style.it editor Bettina Jacomini.

It's impossible to deny the importance of someone like Diane Pernet in the world of fashion and style: her blog A Shaded View on Fashion, covering art, culture, fashion, film, food and music is an inspiration for many people, and regularly gets around 6,000 clicks a day from fashion fans, fashion industry professionals and young students and designers.

Though different for its contents, Schuman’s blog has inspired a new generation of fashionistas and trendsetters thanks to the various portraits of people Schuman takes wherever he goes.

Angelo Flaccavento is instead a young journalist who has so far collaborated with many printed and online publications, among them also Pernet’s site, writing about culture and fashion, while Bettina Jacomini gave me the impression she doesn’t know much about truly independent publishing or fashion.

Diane Pernet briefly told the audience the story of how she launched her site in 2005, starting life blogging and quickly getting hooked. “The highlight of my life blogging experience was when Mark Eley, from Eley Kishimoto, did the Gumball rally, covering 3,000 miles in 6 days and I did a documentary about it and at the same time life blogged from London to Montecarlo,” she recounted. Pernet explained there are around 30 unpaid collaborators based all over the world who contribute to her site. Having written for Pernet’s site, Angelo Flaccavento explained how the Internet allows to immediately reach out to your readers and recounted how he reported on A Shaded View on Fashion from Milan Fashion Week using a sharp and caustic language that you often have to moderate if writing for printed magazines.

The language barrier-free, photo-driven Sartorialist allows to get as much from the blog as you can, Schuman explained, as users don’t have to deal with any specific language but with the semiotics of fashion through his images. With it’s 100,000 clicks a day the Sartorialist has become extremely popular in the last few years, yet, Schuman highlighted, he doesn’t think he is actually influencing the catwalks, “I’m not trying to spot a trend or to prove a point, I just shoot on instinct and let myself be inspired,” he said. Questioned about the future development of online media and blogs Schuman added, “Blogs and printed media websites will continue to grow their relationships and maybe blogs will become a sort of minor league from which newspapers will start picking talents.” Schuman also talked a bit about his relation with Style.com, “I already had an audience when they contacted me," he said, "so I didn’t need them to provide me with an audience or to write the words to present my work, but putting my audience with theirs meant creating something new. They were keen to associate themselves with the persona I created and what they bought in was the association with what I’m doing.”

Jacomini got to fashion in a rather strange and meandering way: she first graduated in agrarian studies, became a researcher in this field (excuse the pun…), then decided to start a new career and became a web journalist. What's strange about her is that, though she's such a fan of the web, she hasn't realised that Style.it is mainly the Italian version of Style.com with some bits and pieces added to make sure that it doesn't look like the exact photocopy of its more stylish American twin. Though the site Jacomini directs is not a blog and it's aimed to a wider audience, it also offers a community section in which people can start a blog (why not starting it independently then?). Readers can also post their photographs in the “Street Memo” page, which is directly copied from The Sartorialist (with one main difference: it’s made by people who post their own pics on it, allowing in this way Style.it to save quite a bit of money). According to Jacomini, Style.it also champions young designers and bloggers and a while back they sent a group of bloggers together with some students from the Istituto Europeo di Design to do some life blogging from Milan’s catwalks (which in Italian means: let’s generate some content without paying anybody).

The effort behind Fashion On Paper was definitely honourable, but there are too many issues which are not yet clear in Italy when it comes to journalism in general and not only to fashion journalism. There are women’s magazines that depend from major publishing houses and are infested by columns written by male journalists strategically placed there because of allegiances with political parties and not because they have any knowledge of women-related issues. Many young people get paid very little or do not get paid at all for writing on sites (or for indirectly generating content as it happens on Style.it) that aren’t blogs and that get money from advertising. Yes, it’s true that contributing with different publications can often help you building your reputation and in some cases can give you credibility and visibility, especially when you are young and unknown, yet there should be a clear difference between independent blogs and sites behind which there are big players and companies with money. This basic difference unfortunately didn’t always come up during the “Fashion On Paper” event. Let's just hope it will be explored in depth in future editions.