Collaboration, Antagonism, Exploitation: Which is the Relation Between Fashion Blogging and Fashion Journalism?

The emergence of fashion blogs in the early 2000s was surrounded both by enthusiasm, due to blog capacity of transferring media power to ordinary fashion consumers, and a choir of criticism because of the irruption of non-professional players in the fashion communication field. One of the more intensely debated topics is the relationship between journalism and blogging, an issue that involves both the evolution of traditional media and the degree of blogger autonomy. In this essay, I will be examining fashion blogging as a subfield of fashion communication to answer the following research question: ten years after the emergence of fashion blogs, which kind of relationship did bloggers and fashion journalism establish within the broader field of fashion communication? The empirical terrain where to search for the answer to this question is the Italian fashion blogipelago; here 30 in-depth interviews with fashion bloggers and six with key informants were collected between 2011 and 2014. Bloggers are studied as relevant agents with heterogeneous levels of power/influence in the field. They are engaged in the construction of a “career” through the weapons of their cultural, economic and social resources which allow them to access the field and use different strategies to shape their relations with other agents –journalists being one of the main subjects they directly or indirectly refer to. Contra simplistic attempts to define blogs as personal diaries and/or journalistic practices, this paper aims at understanding bloggers as agents fighting for legitimacy within an already structured field – that of fashion communication – focusing on how the relationship with established players such as journalists assumes the form of antagonism, collaboration, or exploitation.