Once, fashion fans were more concerned with the newest designs from Burberry rather than the latest version of BlackBerry, but now the web has become the hippest hang-out around. It is to the noughties what Andy Warhol’s Factory studio was to the 1960s: a meeting point for the hottest creative talents, and
the place to report or unearth a new trend, artist, designer, band, hotly tipped restaurant or exhibition. The difference today is that there’s no guest list — anyone with a web connection can join.
Rukaya Chandia, 31, may feel she is the only fashionista in Lancaster, but at Showstudio.com she finds a virtual lifeline to the world of hip. This self- declared “online fashion broadcasting company”, the brainchild of Vogue photographer Nick Knight, is where the style set congregates to discuss the hottest looks, take part in interactive design projects and exchange digital air kisses. “I love fashion, I live for it, but I felt trapped here,” says Chandia, a colourist clerk for a textile designer. “Magazines used to be the only way to keep informed, but by the time a magazine comes out, what’s new is almost over.”
This doesn’t happen at the regularly updated Showstudio, where buzzing forums discuss sartorial matters with serious dedication, from favourite shoes and Dior’s latest collection to design directions. (Question: Is Anaglypta wallpaper back in? Answer: It’s trendy and gorgeous.) As a result, the site has become an essential daily destination for Chandia, where she can see what’s going on, and even speak to photographers, people who work in fashion, stylists, make-up artists and designers.
“The new hunters of cool and their followers can spot stuff from all over the world and post it on the web immediately,” says Reinier Evers, the zeitgeist-surfing director of Trendwatching.com. “Why wait 30 days to find out? Because websites can offer infinite space, they can post more findings, including the niche stuff that normally gets skipped for mainstream discoveries.”
When The Face, Britain’s one-time style bible, fired its final fashioned-out rocket over two years ago, little was made of the role of the internet in its demise, but now it’s clear that there has been a shift in the way that progressive culture is created and disseminated.
“I’m amazed that any of those leading-edge fashion magazines are left,” says Peter York, the cultural commentator who kickstarted many a trend in the 1980s and 1990s. He says: “It’s important that The Face has gone, because the sort of competition that the web now offers would do for it today.”
Online lifestyle magazines trump their print predecessors with dazzling rich media. Why should music fans have to settle for printed words about the hyped-up electro-pop geeks Hot Chip when they can head to the BBC’s Collective, a slick weekly arts e-zine, to read a critique, hear their music and watch a live performance all at once?
Into the Storm is another digital bible where fashion, travel and art are brought to life by the sort of high-concept design normally found in glossy magazines. Here, however, it is interactive. Contents embrace the edgy (south London’s dancehalls) and the glib (a manifesto for pavement walking). Interactive e-mails such as the super-savvy Flavourpill and Urban Junkies update connected scenesters with the daily hip parade. Listings offer insider tips: Dr Lakra’s show at London’s Kate MacGarry gallery; enjoying Castilian and Catalan cuisine at London’s little-known L Restaurant, and “guerilla boutiques”, which pop up and disappear faster than a passing fad.
Members of the online elite are nearly three times as likely to hit websites such as Vogue.com and NME.com for their daily fix as the equivalent magazine in print, the Association of Online Publishers reports. These hunters of cool include nearly half of all affluent 25- to 34-year-olds. Add the emergence of Generation @, those savvy teens and twentysomethings who flock to online networking hang-outs such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook to pursue their social lives, gossip, flirt and discover new bands, and it’s clear that the force is with the web. Indeed, 2.1m of the UK’s 16- to 24-year-olds visit these member community sites each month, an audience the magazine industry would kill for.
Showstudio is in the vanguard of this cavalcade. As ambitious in its scope as the maverick designer Hussein Chalayan’s latest collection, it grabs fashion photography by its tailored lapels and thrusts it into the broadband age. At the website, “viewers”, as they are referred to, are not simply passive consumers but become active participants in the fashion-making process through a host of inter-active projects. One currently invites you to download garment patterns by notable designers such as the so-hot-right-now Gareth Pugh, sew them up and create the outfit for yourself. You then post a photo of your effort on the site, where it sits alongside the designer’s original.
Recently, visitors were also encouraged to download a film shot by Nick Knight, edit it and then upload the result, to sit online beside others from celebrities who included the film director Mike Figgis and the artist Christopher Seguine.
The web’s unique interactivity is what creates simultaneously both a community and an audiovisual experience. “We’re interested in the possibilities of the technology,” says Penny Martin, Showstudio’s editor-in-chief. “Magazines are shopping manuals, where an authoritative, didactic voice merely tells you what to buy. Showstudio is about inviting the audience to come backstage and have a one-to-one with their heroes.”
Through new media, broadband “viewers” anywhere in the world are able to live the experience for themselves. At Foundintranslation — a site dedicated to the works of bleeding-edge Japanese visual artists — video clips and Flash animation mean you can take a view without relying on a critic’s opinion.
Nor do visitors stop there — the web enables anybody to become a trend sleuth. For Reinier Evers, this has one enormous implication: journalists are no longer sole guardians of the gateway to cool. “We can all be cool-hunters today — which means many more competitors, and many more eyes and ears, make it hard to keep a scoop,” he says.
With online arbiters of style now patrolling the web in legions, sniffing out the new, the ageing style-mag hacks must crave their Prada fireside slippers. On his daily blog, Coolhunting, Josh Rubin updates a worldwide audience with news of designer sneakers, high-concept furniture and city breaks (head to Reykjavik, Rubin advises). His taxonomical approach, listing cool items, events and miscellany as soon as he comes across them, could exist only on the web.
“Before creating my website, any of these references were either bookmarked in my browser, torn out of magazines, kept in a large folder, or were pictures taken on a street,” Rubin says. “It was all very disorganised. I originally created the website as a way to keep it all together; it kind of grew by word of mouth.”
As for music, who needs MTV any more? Visit Elbows, the daily MP3 blog aggregator — which collates the wisdom of hundreds of online music nerds — and listen to the hottest new tracks, and nobody will put one over on you next time you wander into an independent record store. This is the place to discover the next Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, or Wolf Parade, two bands who emerged riding the crest of the MySpace wave this year.
“The best thing about writing online reviews yourself is that you can help other people discover an artist, band or film that you really like,” says Tim Murray, a 31-year-old policy officer for the NHS, from London. Murray is a regular contributor to the BBC’s Collective e-zine, which actively encourages members with weekly prizes, and places the best of their reviews of arts and culture beside articles by professionals.
For Murray, however, amateurs such as himself are the real stars at Collective, reviewing events that may have passed beneath the radar of the site’s paid writers: unearthing the next wave of young British artists or art-house movies. “I find the reviews by other users far more interesting than the professional editorial on the site,” Murray says, “because they can run as long as writers want and you actually get more information from them.”
A profound divide yawns between yesterday’s way and today’s. When readers paid cash for a style magazine, they were subscribing to the trusted authority of known writers, buying into their cache of cool. Peter York says: “You were laying your trust in the magazine’s editor to negotiate the minefield for you. ‘Buy nothing till you buy Vogue’, as they used to say.” Yet in the democracy of the web, anybody can say what they want. A blogger may declare puce lederhosen to be the next fashion hit, but woe betide the hapless hipster who follows this advice.
“I don’t read any blogs,” says Taryn Ross, founder of Urban Junkies. “We’ve all seen the glory stories like Belle de Jour, but, for a long time, most of what you found on the web was the result of one person sitting at home and churning it out. There was no real authority.”
Ross believes this is slowly changing, as opinion-formers gravitate to the web and the ranks of respected online sources swell. Ross’s own daily e-mail employs established cultural commentators to stay on the qui vive for its 25,000 subscribers, and if subscribers have a bad experience, they can report it immediately. Such swift feedback is impossible in print.
For Rukaya Chandia, this is precisely what makes the web the natural medium for trend-watchers like herself. “There’s only so much that a magazine can do to involve its readers — it is very two- dimensional. On a website, it’s like having a conversation with someone, rather than being preached at. All you have to do is click the return button.”
Today’s musts
KID HARPOON Swaggering rock’n’roll and dirty electric melodies. “My favourite swashbuckling Englishman,” says one MP3 blogger at elbo.ws. Listen at www.myspace.com/kidharpoon.
GARETH PUGH So-hot-right-now “ever innovative” fashion innocent from Sunderland. View his interactive photo installation at www.intothestorm.com.
SPORTSWEAR From Stella McCartney tennis togs to D&G skiwear, in high-fashion circles, “sport is alive and kickin’ now more than ever”, says www.jcreport.com.
NEW RAVE The music genre on the lips of every hipster, mashing dance music bass lines with punk sensibilities. Spearheaded by Klaxons, and happening London club night Bosh!. See www.NME.com.
SCHREIBER CHAIR London-based designer Timothy Schreiber’s sleek carbon-fibre chairs are “a welcome addition to almost any home or office aesthetic”, says www.coolhunting.com.
DEMAND EXHIBITION By creating life-size card models of settings such as Saddam Hussein’s holiday home, Thomas Demand, with a new show at London’s Serpentine Gallery, “brilliantly points out that much of modern existence is a shabby, paper reality”, says the BBC’s Collective.
CONCRETE WALLPAPER
“The trend for polished concrete in interiors has taken on a fantastic new twist. Now you can dress it up with a wallpaper finish. We predict a concrete wallpaper craze,” says www.thecoolhunter.net.
COOL CLICKS
elbo.ws
www.bbc.co.uk/collective
www.coolhunting.com
www.fashioncapital.co.uk
www.flavourpill.co.uk
www.foundintranslation.co.uk
www.intothestorm.com
www.jcreport.com
www.joshspear.com
www.kctv.co.uk
www.musichurts.com
www.showstudio.com
www.skrufff.com
www.thecoolhunter.net
www.urbanjunkies.com
