Fashion Mash-up Panelists (L-R): Nicole Lindgren, Christina Topacio, Ranier Falco, host Joanna Riley-Weidenmiller, Maggie Alhadeff, Siv Lam, Mira Torres, and Avalonne Summers
Launching a fashion blog? For anyone tackling this topic, The San Francisco Fashion and Merchants Alliance held its Fashion Mash-Up ‘Why Blog About Fashion’ last week to help. Read on to meet the panel of distinguished Bay Area fashion bloggers and their thoughts on the state of fashion blogging.
So why blog about fashion anyway? SFFAMA creator Owen Geronimo and 360Fashion’s Joanna Riley-Weidenmiller joined seven Bay Area fashion bloggers in a panel discussion last Thursday to dissect this topic.
Referencing a statement by Rachel Zoe who said ‘style gives you a voice without speaking,’ panelist Maggie Alhadeff of Mimosas in Bed said, “with blogs, it gives you an actual voice that goes beyond that.”
The other six panelists for the Mash-Up included Style Bust’s Nicole Lindgren, The Falco’s Rainier Falco, Profresh Style’s Christina Topacio, Avalonne Summers of the girl from hk, ldn & sf, J.Crewaholics’s Siv Lam and The Beauty Bohemian’s Mira Torres.
The seven panelists represented a range of personalities, a key asset all agree is necessary from the blogger for creating a blog that will stick with readers and maintain following.
“Be as real as possible,” Topacio says.
Topacio not only talks about personal style, but love and relationships on Profresh Style. For Summers, who studies film, fashion is a hobby and her blog a supplement to her film-making interests. Falco chooses the controversial, snarky approach to lure in followers with his sarcastic humor. You shouldn’t have to guess which of the panelists’ blogs started as a J. Crew obsession, while others cover beauty and fashion in a variety of ways.
Whichever approach the blogger chooses, panelists agreed on one thing: know your niche and stick with it. Keeping your audience engaged, panelists said, requires pairing old basics of “talking to your readers” with the new rules of social and mobile media technology such as Facebook, Twitter and linking all of this technology to spread your voice.
What will combining all of this technology with a unique blog voice mean for fashion? According to Rainier Falco, it may mean a lot in the future.
“Fashion bloggers are basically the historians of fashion [today],” Falco says, “and in 50 to 60 years when people want to dress vintage, they’ll look at our blogs and see how it was done.”
Photography courtesy of Del Geronimo and Nichole Albright
