You may think of Tumblr as a repository of pretty pictures and fandom chatter, but it’s also home to a thriving fashion community. And for years, Tumblr has been quietly promoting the careers of some of its best and brightest fashion bloggers by sending them to New York Fashion Week.
Every year for the last three years, Tumblr has plucked a group of avid fashionistas from its firmament and given them eight days among New York’s glittering fashion elite. In 2011, its first year, it sent a veritable army of 24 bloggers to cover the events of NYFW, choosing them via email application. This year, Tumblr Fashion Evangelist Valentine Uhovski has chosen seven lucky bloggers—a mix of street bloggers, photographers, GIF-makers, curators, and artists—to bring Tumblr community the best of the week in fashion.
Being chosen to attend the event is a major opportunity for the bloggers: Past Tumblr NYFW attendees have gone on to publish books and work within the industry. One recently became an editor at GQ. And since Tumblr’s ad team has by now smoothed out the bumps that made their early attempts at liaising with the industry a bit of a nightmare, it’s a win for the industry as well.
So what kind of blog will win you a trip to fashion week? This year, it’s a mix of creativity, aesthetic sense, and a unique voice.
Two of those chosen are GIF artists who don’t actually do any fashion blogging. But both have a well-developed artistic sense that make it easy to see why Tumblr liked them.
Rochester Institute of Technology student Sam Cannon’s inspired photographic GIFs will clearly fit right in:
GIF by samcannon
GIF artist and animator traceloops has a similarly iconoclastic blog style, combined with a love of both high and low culture: he has a separate Tumblr for art museum GIFs—and one for animated pizza skins.
GIF by traceloops
Three of the chosen are bloggers who chronicle street fashion: Chantal Adair, Micaiah Carter, and Christopher Fenimore. Interestingly, all three of them are based out of New York, a sign that Tumblr, itself a New York company, wanted to give a boost to artists within the local fashion scene.
Photo by Christopher Fenimore
But our favorites out of the mix are Rachel and Nicole Effendy, known to Tumblr as Rachel et Nicole. These two adventurous sisters combine a love of fashion with a love of place and sense of setting that turns their gorgeous, fun photoshoots into something you can’t believe you didn’t find in a fashion magazine to begin with. They’re the perfect candidates for NYFW.
Photo via racheletnicole
Photo via racheletnicole
Although Fashion Week just started today, some of the bloggers are already busily chronicling the runway—and living it up in the process. Last year, the Fashion Week focus was on surviving the winter chill; this year, it may just be on these seven bloggers and their vision for bringing offline fashion culture to Tumblr’s eager online community.
Photo via racheletnicole
