Is the Golden Era of Fashion Blogs Over? An Analysis of the Italian and Spanish Fields of Fashion Blogging

Have we entered a new phase in the history of fashion blogging? If so, what are its characteristics? How does it work? What is the degree of institutionalization within the field? This chapter explores these issues by means of a comparison between the Italian and Spanish fields of fashion blogging, where the rise of this new communication channel began somewhat later than in the English- speaking world. By the term ‘blog’ we refer to an online platform for the production of digital contents to be shared, asynchronously, with an imagined audience whose composition and size become known only after a new post is published (boyd 2006); a fashion blog is then a platform of this kind whose subject of conversation is fashion, often in the broad sense of clothing, beauty and lifestyle-related topics. As Ro- camora (2011: 409) puts it, blogs build a ‘key space for the production and the circulation of fashion discourse’. Bloggers are the authors of these digital contents or, to be more precise, the ‘face’ of these blogs, and play multiple roles (Rocamora and Bartlett, 2009: 111). They in- clude top models, stylists, opinion leaders, commentators, sometimes entrepreneurs, and, eventually, digital influencers. However, blogs often consist of complex editorial projects built by a team of professionals working for and around the blogger (photographers, web designers, PRs, marketing persons and so forth). The arguments formulated in this chapter are based on quantitative and qualitative research carried out in Italy and Spain.