Except these weren’t just beautiful people. These were fashion bloggers, selfie stars whose facility with heated hair tools and knack for posing long ago upended a field once strictly dominated by runway shows and magazine glossies. In attendance, for example, was Aimee Song (known as@songofstyle, with 1.58 million followers), a Los Angeles blogger famous for her girly grunge aesthetic and lips-parted-eyes-staring-dead-into-the-camera expression; her Instagram of a pair of $580 Isabel Marant sandals (basically Birkenstocks with pink bows), which she’d bought earlier that afternoon, had garnered more than 27,000 likes. There was also Julie Sariñana (@SincerelyJules, 1.4 million), another L.A.-based blogger, whosephoto outside the Joule in a white slip dress and Vince espadrille platform sandals would later be used to advertise the shoe, which had sold out at all department stores, on eBay. There was Andreas Wijk (@andreaswijk, 129k), the orange-colored Justin Bieber of Sweden, and Wendy Nguyen(@wendyslookbook, 510k), subject of the viral YouTube video “25 Ways to Wear a Scarf in 4.5 Minutes!” And then there was Dallas’s own Jane Aldridge(@seaofshoes, 132k), quietly slinking about in leather pants and a red flannel shirt, champagne in hand.
The influence wielded by this flock of pout-prone lips and dewy eyelashes was nothing short of staggering. These partygoers reached more than 13.5 million followers on Instagram combined. Many made more than $20,000 a month—some more than $80,000—just from posting links to sites that sold the short-shorts and Chanel shoes that they wore in their photos. Factoring in the revenue from banner ads on their websites, sponsored posts, and store appearances, a number of top bloggers raked in more than $1 million a year. And now they were waiting—having flown in from Los Angeles and New York and more than eighteen countries, some as far away as Australia and China—to meet the person who had made much of this money-making possible: a redheaded 26-year-old from Highland Park named Amber Venz.
Amber and her boyfriend, Baxter Box, had revolutionized the fashion world a few years earlier when, almost single-handedly, they figured out how to do the near impossible: easily monetize the content of fashion blogs. In 2011, with only a modest family investment, they’d built rewardStyle, a fashion technology company that collects commissions from retailers on behalf of bloggers and more-traditional publishers (think the websites of some major magazines) whose pictures induce readers to buy baubles online. In three years the company had grown to include 87 employees in Dallas and London, a network of 4,000 retailers, and more than 14,000 “publishers,” who drove $155 million in retail sales in 2013 alone (rewardStyle declined to release information about its amount of revenue). As rewardStyle’s top 200 earners, the bloggers on the lawn had been invited to the company’s second annual conference, hosted at the Joule. Because rewardStyle only makes money when its publishers do, the goal of the next three days was to teach the women how to make even more money by giving them strategies for effective website design (NewYorker.com was used as a model) and for search engine optimization (using, as an example, the key words “Valentino Rockstud pumps” ). The cocktail party was a networking event to kick the invitation-only conference off. (...)
Here's a theory about the rise of fashion blogging: in 2008 and 2009, during the dark days of the recession, magazines laid off employees left and right. Ad pages shrank, and, perhaps coincidentally, the brands that continued to advertise continued to be written about. Yet aspiring fashionistas, many of them unemployed millennials living with their parents, had plenty more to say. Blogger software was free and easy, so those young women turned to the Internet and started doing what magazines weren’t—mixing high and low brands and taking pictures that were rough and unexpected. Some bloggers developed loyal followings, and soon icons like Karl Lagerfeld, the white-ponytailed Werner Herzog of fashion, were greeting bloggers like Tavi Gevinson, a then fourteen-year-old from the Chicago suburbs, after their shows. In 2009 Dolce and Gabbana famously upset the runway’s feudal hierarchies when it sat Bryanboy, a Filipino blogger, just two seats away from Vogue’s Anna Wintour in the front row of the Milan spring-summer show.
by Francesca Mari, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Zizzo
