Is Fashion Criticism Still A Thing?

Navigating The Fashion Media World With Amy Odell

With Pitti Uomo, the Paris Haute Couture shows, and Fashion Week kicking off in New York in two days, fashion critics in legacy media, on YouTube, and TikTok sure have a lot to cover. And it doesn’t help that the internet has completely changed how people and fashion professionals consume them. With its democratisation, fashion has become more accessible to people, yet it is going through major shifts right now, rightly because the internet has turned the tide.

From February to the beginning of March, I will do a round of Underrated Fashion Professional Talks that explores the twists and turns of fashion media and fashion criticism with three journalists. For the first instalment, I chatted with

Amy Odell

, the journalist behind the

Back Row

publication and author of Anna, The Biography.

During our conversation, Amy shared some aspects of fashion media and the changes affecting fashion criticism through the lens of a writer and editor who knows the strengths and weaknesses of the fashion industry. We talked about the influence of TikTok on fashion criticism and how the current fashion magazine model is failing.

---

Hello Amy, can you please introduce yourself and tell me why you started your newsletter on Substack after years of being a journalist?

Hello, I am Amy Odell. I started

Back Row

when I was finishing up working on my book Anna the Biography. I had been working pretty full-time on it for so long that I didn't know what I was going to do next. I considered trying to look for a full-time job. I may have even applied to a couple of things, but the media industry is not really at its best. Since I really enjoyed working on my own, I wanted to continue doing that. 

I also really thought that there was a huge opportunity in fashion to do an independent newsletter that would be able to do the things that people who work at legacy titles really can't do: have honest conversations about things going on in the industry and talk about brands in an honest way. People who work at legacy magazines like Vogue, Elle, or Harper's Bazaar can't really do that because they have to placate advertisers. So I'm in this really nice position where the newsletter is fully reader-supported and reader-funded, and I don't have to placate any brands. And that was something that I had to do my whole career. I remember when I was working at The Cut, I used to do a morning news roundup every day. It would be like a bulleted list of things you might want to know about. And I threw in an item about a Gucci pop-up shop, and it had been reported somewhere that nobody went to that opening. And I quickly dashed off this one sentence, saying no one went to the pop-up opening. Gucci got upset, so I had to change it. 

I'm not dealing with that now, and that's really nice. Writing this newsletter has also been a way for me to have fun. I don't know if I could get many of the things I write published anywhere else. 

Given what you just said, do you think real fashion journalism doesn't exist? 

I think it's hard to find. Public newspapers like The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will do real journalism. But I think even those publications probably have some fear of advertisers all the time because, typically, the reason that publications like The New York Times or even New York Magazine have fashion coverage is to attract advertising money. 

Okay, so your last comment ties in well with the next question. As you know, I wanted to talk with you about fashion criticism. I would like to know what fashion criticism was like when you first started your career and how it is now.  

Well, I would guess there's a lot less fashion criticism being published now in traditional media, but there's a lot more fashion criticism in other media, like on TikTok. We have a whole new kind of citizen critics, whether varying levels of professional expertise weigh in on runway shows. I know that those reviews get millions more impressions than traditional fashion criticism articles like you might read in Women's Wear Daily or The New York Times. I also think this is not true for every critic like Cathy Horyn, who writes for The Cut and is someone I always go out of my way to read. I think that publications like Women's Wear Daily or Vogue are probably slightly more cautious about what they say about designers because they have that ad business. They need those relationships to book features or borrow clothing. That is how I would say it has evolved.

I don't think fashion criticism has ever been so much for the average media consumer because I don't think the average media consumer is really reading those reviews. 

Amy Odell

The last thing you said is interesting because I work in luxury fashion e-commerce, and part of my work is describing products. To do that, I have to read these fashion reviews because this is where I get the details of what I'm supposed to describe. But it is also true that I wasn't reading them when I wasn’t in the industry. I would go through a Vogue but wouldn't look for why that dress has that detail. I wasn't so thorough. That’s why I agree with you when you say that it's more for professionals rather than a larger audience, even though it has changed a little bit because of the emergence of TikTok, with people doing reviews on it.  

People will watch it on TikTok if you do a good video. I should say that I'm less tapped into YouTube, but I know there are people doing similar stuff on there, talking about fashion and fashion history or runway shows. And that got a lot of views. But, you know, I really like keeping up with the shows that way because. You see the clothes. If you run a review in a newspaper, they're going to print a couple of images and talk about three or four shows, but on TikTok, they can say what they want to say and then show you what they're talking about. It's just a really convenient way to understand what's happening on the runways. And, you know, some people who are quite popular seek out to see what they're saying about the shows. They have real professional expertise in the industry, too. And that comes through in the way that they're able to talk about fashion. 

I initially started this series wanting to focus on fashion criticism in France, Italy, and the USA. As an English speaker, I'd like to ask if you see a difference in how fashion is reported in the US and the UK.  

I don't know. That's hard for me to say because I'm not comparing when consuming coverage. Europeans may be more interested. I think in America, the average American media consumer is just not interested. This is my experience from a long career of seeing traffic stats on websites and knowing how much traffic these reviews and runway shows got. New York magazine and Elle.com used to publish runway shows and stopped doing that. Harper's Bazaar still publishes a few of them, but Vogue is really the only publication that publishes all the shows. And even that is a business thing because brands pay for that coverage. They've managed to monetise it pretty smartly, in addition to slotting ads between the slides. They do that because the effort that it takes to put the shows online does not justify the return on that investment.

I asked you this because I started this series of interviews to understand if language and culture influenced the way shows were reported. Despite more content about fashion, some don’t seem as thorough. 

I guess I take a different view because I think that if someone is getting an audience on their fashion coverage, they're not an expert and don't have that traditional training as I did; they're doing something right, and I don't think you can discount them because they're drawing people in for a reason. 

That's why my last question is: Do you think the role of fashion criticism is still relevant today?  

I think it's relevant to the industry that likes to look and go to shows, read reviews, and talk about them with each other. It's relevant if it keeps the Gucci money flowing into a publication like The New York Times, which is doing great journalism, like the world needs, then, yes, it's relevant. Is it necessary? In the grand scheme of the fashion industry, continuing to hum and roll along? No, I don't think so. It doesn't help consumers make decisions about what they're buying. I guess the fate of fashion criticism really rests in the fate of the media and fashion media industries. We have been watching the fashion media as we know it undergo this kind of slow, but also not slow, super drastic transformation thanks to the internet and the business model failing. You know, they say, if you're an entrepreneur, the best thing that could happen to you if you're going to fail is to fail fast. That's not really happened to legacy fashion media, but we’re seeing it shrink. We’re seeing cuts, AI is here, and who knows how that’s going to affect things? I think that’s going to be fascinating to see. These magazines have really pivoted their business model to shopping content. How can they get people to buy sneakers and belts from their sites and get affiliate kickbacks? And AI is going to change that completely. If that cuts into the budgets of these publications and they need to make cuts, what will they cut? Is it going to be the fancy critic? Is it going to be the people doing the shopping content that no longer provide a financial return? Maybe, I don't know. So that'll be really interesting to see. 

I'm wondering about that as well because as far as shopping content for a magazine, Vogue is going towards such a route. Reading that article, you wrote on your Substack about Vogue veering towards more and more shopping content. I wonder if it’s right because when you see the landscape of the Net-A-Porter and the Farfetch of this world, it’s not going well even for them. I am even more puzzled for a media like Vogue to do that because it's not their area of expertise.  

I know, they've had to really adapt. And that's a good point about those e-commerce sites not doing so well anymore. That may point to the changing nature of the luxury customer, which I've been talking about in my newsletter, how it's really more about that super wealthy client versus the aspirational shopper. I haven't been studying those companies so much lately, but it'll be interesting to see. I say all this, yet I'm not happy about this. I appreciate all forms of cultural criticism. I wish we had more great fashion criticism out there. But I also understand why we don't and why. I wouldn’t say it’s disappearing; I think the articles will fade away slowly. But the idea of fashion criticism is, with all these citizen reviewers on TikTok and YouTube, going to continue to grow, and that's going to be where all the eyeballs will go. I don't think there's ever been a time in fashion when any medium has been able to draw so many eyeballs to runway shows such as TikTok. I think that's really important. 

Yes, I agree. I'm going to circle back again to e-commerce because one thing I've seen is some luxury fashion online retailers used to have a publication. For example, Net-A-Porter has Porter. Matches also used to have an editorial; as far as I know, it's gone. Porter used to translate it into many languages; now, it is just in English. They don't produce it in other languages. So here, too, you see that even though it wasn't fashion criticism, they were creating shopping and aspirational content. And you can see that even that is not working in places where it should.  

That's a good point. And I think that's also not just unique to fashion. A lot of brands have ideas about doing a magazine, and then they just can't do it, so they stop because it's really hard to do good editorial in a company that's not a media company. I've seen that time and time again through friends and my own consulting experience. I just think it's really hard for companies not in the business of making content to commit to it and do it well over a long period of time. I think the Net-A-Porter magazine is actually quite good. I always see their covers surface for me. They got really good stars to do them with beautiful photos and nice articles. They're probably one of the few success stories.  

Net-A-Porter is the only one that succeeded because it was a pioneer that hired people from the media world, so they knew what they were doing, whereas in other places, that wasn't the case.  

Yes, that's true. But I think it's also hard. Net-A-Porter is clearly letting the people do what they know. Many companies just don't know how to bring in people who are really good at editorial and let them do what they do best. They let other concerns get in the way of the content. That may be right; maybe they should do that. As an editorial person, I don't know what the answer is.

---

And that’s it! But before leaving you, I’d like to ask you a couple of questions:

• Does reading fashion reviews enrich your understanding of shows and the inner workings of the industry?

• Do you find them irrelevant? If so, why?

Ps: In chat, I will be posting a video of fashion journalist and YouTuber Odunayo Ojo recommending some of his favourite fashion critics. Feel free to answer if you follow them; who are your favourite fashion critics? In brief, let’s keep on the conversation!

I won’t send it via email as I’ve realised it might be overwhelming for your precious inboxes, so check your Substack App. If you don’t have it but you have a Substack profile, you can still access the chat here.

---