I am so proud of the Learning Annex on Coutorture. Sarah has been hard at work creating a space for learning, sharing, and community building as an interim solution for Coutorture as our parents at Sugar Inc go about building the top secret super project. It has a ton of information and we post twice a day on topics the relate to Coutorture, the community and becoming a better blogger.
I have to smile
I have to show
I have be nice all the time
I have to say hello baby
I have to wake up everyday
Chick lit heroines are always editors, fashion designers or publicists. That is a given. Apparently these are the only careers found palatable by yearning young women which explains the demographics of the assistant and junior associates population of New York City (well that and the scourge that is Sex and the City) but why is it that the default career for downtrodden, sweet but not very bright, needs to learn to make something of her life woman fashion? I have noticed this in several movies and it drives me nuts. Amy Poehler’s character in Baby Mama was sent off to fashion school in Philly. The younger sister in Good in Bed had no purpose in life (despite seeming rather good at poetry when crashing Princeton) except to style people!
Why is the default career never human resources (because they are friendly and good with people!) or plumbing (the depths of their smarter but less emotionally aware older female friends or sister) or really anything else that doesn’t involve looking at fabric and saying PRETTY? Its not that fucking easy guys. Fashion is not simply about spouting your taste. The fact that its an extremely technical industry straight from design to sourcing and manufacturing on up to merchandising never seems to occur to these story editors. But they fashion is clearly all that women are capable of right?
We have an exceptional photo editorial on Coutorture today entitled Glittering Cruelty. And the interview to go with it is a blast.
The shoot was an amazing collaborative experience. I was so exhausted by the end of it not just because of the physical exertion of dealing with the corsets but from the collapse of the collective creative energy as soon as I called “wrap” at the end of the day. I never really understood the mania of theater people but I think I got a touch of the excitement of working in a really great ensemble with this shoot. The combination of Megg Morales’ enthusiasm as a model, Timothy’s go get it attitude as our MUA, the styling of the blondes, the creative shooting of Justin, and give and take of Meg and I as we pulled it all together made for quite an experience. I literally passed out the second I got home. But it was worth it.
I am really enjoying where our Garmento series is going on Coutorture. We explore denim fabric sourcing in our feature today. Click through to read the write up or watch the video here.
Sometimes I feel like its really difficult to get an entire community to engage and interact around a topic. But I have a feeling that weighing in on the worst fashion might end up being something everyone involved with Coutorture can enjoy. We did a little shoutout that I am reprinting here in the hopes that we can do a little round-up on Friday on just what is going down worldwide from Seattle to Singapore!
With street style blogs exploding it is easy enough to find out what people are wearing just about anywhere. At this rate you can peek everything from Reykjavik to Cape Town without breaking a sweat. But what about the really bad trends? Fash-Eccentric brings us the biggest fashion faux pas from Singapore. Apparently the surge of the not plastic bags has gone even more global. The list makes us really curious about other not so hot spots around the world as we would imagine even the trendiest fashion capital has a few fashion victims. Coutorture is based smack dab in the middle of Williamsburg currently and we have to admit we seem some scary outfits every day. We think its time for our other international partners to weigh in!
Ahhh what I think is probably my first editor’s letter. We have quite a few technical restrictions on Coutorture these days and of course resources to get things fixed take longer to be alloted in a bigger organization but we have come up with our own homegrown solution to finding all of our original materials. We have one big post with everything on it! One day it will be Coutorture.com/spreads but today well its just a number and a post with an editor’s letter attached.
Coutorture is proud to produce its own original and exclusive fashion spreads with a team of savvy editors, photographers, makeup artists and stylists. Our photo editorials are inspired by what we believe is happening now in fashion, from the immediacy of a collection fresh off the catwalk that won’t hit the store for months to current season collections that reflect the cultural moment. Our ethos is firmly grounded in the belief that fashion does not happen with a three month lead time but in the moment. We aim to capture and publish style at a pace as quick as the business of fashion itself. But most critically we publish original work that comes from our own unique vision, a vision honed by the best new media and the blogosphere has to offer, with quality and standards to match. Julie Fredrickson, Editor in Chief
We had a productive talk on BlogTalkRadio for Coutorture today on the Basics of Web Analytics. I was personally terrified for today’s show because its such a complex subject with very little concretes. But I think we did OK.
Here are some resources you might want to wander through to help understand the points I talked about including log file analysis versus page tagging, hits and why they are so inflated, pageviews versus uniques and all that stuff. Naturally wikipedia has some good stuff. Here is a great listing of cool things you can do with Google Analytics. One of my favorite pieces on analytics is called “Traffic Is a Metric, Nothing More” and then a sequel for the more politically incorrect called Traffic Is Magical.
WWD has a piece on bloggers gaining access today. This wasn’t initially how I perceived the piece as the bloggers gain respect and access thing has be done. The piece is basically a retread of the same blogger gets access piece that has been run in WWD, Mediabistro, The Wall Street Journal, and even the New York Times. I had hoped it would focus a little more on innovations in the medium of new media but apparently this plays to the crowd better. Here is the bit I am mentioned in.
And while Internet-only venues are still experimenting themselves, some are becoming more like fashion magazines in other ways. Julie Fredrickson of Coutorture, who has made herself prominent in the debate, said she no longer considers Coutorture a blog, since it has begun steadily producing editorial shoots with models (mostly working for free) and samples called in from designers. They shot de la Renta and Isaac Mizrahi fall collections for online spreads that cost about $300 to $400 each to produce — not exactly Annie Leibovitz for Vogue, but significantly more investment than some might expect.
“I got tired of blogging in a lot of ways,” Fredrickson said. “A lot of people are focused on re-blogging stuff. It’s not actually media — it’s looking at photos and commenting on it. Fast, real-time shoots, sort of guerrilla fashion spreads, are the next revolution.”
Now to clarify I don’t think Coutorture isn’t a blog because we run fashion shoots. Its because we don’t present content in an agnostic chronological format which is the essential definition of a blog. A blog is a blog because of its content management system and presentation not because of its content. Blogs present information in chronological order with no reference to what is more or less important but rather with what was published first. We deliberately feature content in our photos and features in a way that focuses on the best content of the day, letting the smaller pieces like the shoutouts dip in and out of focus, while the original produced content like our photo editorials retains the focus. This privileging of original information created by one’s own editorial team is to me the definition of proper editorial work.
Repurposing other people’s work is not proper media persay, it may be a wonderful extension of the media world, but a world of critics and only so many originators takes away from the essential need to have something worthy of critique. And I think we may have reached that impasse with a world of blogs with unique perspectives and very few media centers with their own produced content. Sadly I think this trend will only get worse, with media outlets themselves giving in to this need, as it is cheaper and easier and frankly more popular to critique and collate information than it is to come up with something new. I don’t even know how long it is possible to maintain what we have been doing on Coutorture in all honesty.
Our spring shoot with three of Elite’s Fresh Faces is somewhat bittersweet for me. But I am really enjoying the process of doing more and more of the makeup. The companion beauty piece to La Belle Dame sans Merci is called Birth of Venus. Looking at the photo I think it should be somewhat obvious why I chose the title. Anyway, in the new Beauty Spreads we are doing on Coutorture I break down a beauty look from one of our shoots with products used, application, and a complete description of why I like the products. Clearly I have gotten a little handier with photoshop in recent weeks but I think I am putting it to good use with all my beauty product line ups.
Certain designers have a thing for delving in the past, particularly when it comes to forecasting the future. Our love of comedy show Mystery Science Theater 3000 helped us appreciate old-timey gem Clothing of The Future. The video highlights fashion of the future, err well in the year 2000, withe some of America’s greatest designers. And let’s just say we let out our inner Crow T. Robot with our critiques of the video. Check out the video here and the mashup I did with the clothing on Coutorture
I am really proud to introduce a new series on Coutorture called Garmento that explores the unsung heroes of fashion. It will focus on people behind the scenes instead of the traditional editors and designers that usually hog the limelight. The first piece in what I hope will be on ongoing series is a visit to Quist Industries. Bob Bland, Brooklyn based designer (of her own line Brooklyn Royalty as well as menswear work for lines like Triple Five Soul) and writer takes us on a tour of the tee-shirt making process. I am putting up the video here but I encourage you to take a look at the whole post and the gallery as its fascinating stuff. Its on Digg as well so if you have an account go digg it if you like it.
It is interesting to be an old timer. Blessedly insights that you swore would take off years ago eventually do get their time in the sun. The ever observant and informed Danielle at Final Fashion asks the tough question about just how much fashion information can be produced and consumed.
I recently learned that Nick Ut is the man responsible for not one but two of the most unsettling photos in American history. The are worlds apart and yet it is the same man. This is us America. Do you like what you see? I honestly cannot decide which photo makes me more depressed. Or is it the fact that there were taken 35 years apart? And which makes shows us to be more depraved?
