PicoBlog

Thank you for subscribing to Back Row. Become a paying member to read this post in full and get exclusive fashion week coverage, beginning next week (a free preview is coming later this week). Are you excited for fashion week? How could you not be?! Paid subscribers also get access to the complete Back Row archive and commenting.

Here’s what else paid subscribers are reading:

Anyone with a passing interest in award shows and what celebrities wear to them has almost no reason to tune into the actual broadcast or red carpet pre-show. (Or post-show, if those even still exist.) We can find the highlights and unfiltered commentary about them on TikTok, where refreshingly honest critiques surface in a way they never did for many of us on Instagram or other social platforms. Traditional media outlets that compete in SEO Hunger Games following every red carpet event, including E! but also glossy fashion magazines, find themselves losing authority to people who simply love this stuff enough to make videos about it in their free time, and aren’t constrained by corporate concerns like advertising or relationships with celebrities.

Sure, you get a lot of clichéd commentary on TikTok, like that the Jean Paul Gaultier couture dress Lizzo wore Sunday night to the VMAs looked like a “trash bag.” Yet there are also fashion experts like Mandy Lee, who pointed out that the dress is awesome, and, “There’s so much power in taking up space, especially for a plus-size woman.”

But for the most part, these are not professional fashion people or journalists, they’re pop culture fans who want to analyze Taylor Swift’s sparkly mini dress by Oscar de la Renta (please see: Blakely Thornton’s reaction to that in his VMAs recap, watch through to the end). These creators have no reason to kiss her ass — they aren’t trying to book her for photo shoots or interviews — so they often don’t. (E!, meanwhile, gushed on Instagram re: Taylor, “We can’t come to the phone right now, we’re still thinking about this dress.”) In a popular, highly entertaining Met Gala fashion recap video that has stayed with me, Olivia Broussard said what no publication seeking ad dollars ever could: “It was really rough for the Louis Vuitton girls last night, I feel really bad for all of them that were contractually obligated to wear these outfits.”

What must make ceding this kind of coverage to individual creators particularly painful for legacy outlets is that they used to do it. In fact, they pioneered it. I should note that long-running sites like Go Fug Yourself and Tom + Lorenzo remain must-reads for millions of us because they have never deviated from their coverage of celebrity fashion, and do so in the same individualistic, voice-driven style that people now respond to on TikTok. But another huge bloc of media has given it up.

ncG1vNJzZmiZna68pbHLpWWsrZKowaKvymeaqKVfpXypu9ZmnZqrmJ68r3nPqKOim5Visaqxw2aYp5xdrLKvwA%3D%3D