Was the change to digital journalism important in Pandora Sykes’s career?

While her role as Wardrobe Mistress has increased her cultural capital, it has at the same time heightened her reputation and symbolic capital within the publication and the professional field. Not only has this promoted her career at The Sunday Times Style but it has also led to high profile interviews with fashion professionals including model Amber Valetta, footwear designer Charlotte Dellal of Charlotte Olympia and Kimberly Stewart.

While this has increased her cultural capital – the one of “journalistic excellence” – it has also reinforced her position as a key agent and professional fashion journalist in the field of fashion media. This was of benefit to Sykes when shifting to digital media, which represented an opportunity to express herself in a new way, one that is authentic and detached from any style codes of print journalism.

Having launched her blog pandorasykes.com in 2010, prior to her role at The Sunday Times Style, the original idea behind it was to serve as a platform where she mainly drew attention to her published work. Over the years Sykes managed to develop a different writing style, one that escaped the strict style codes of journalism. As argued by McRobbie these are deeply rooted in the publication’s ‘house style’, which has become essential for magazines, to educate staff members on tone and language of the publication as well as on how to report on fashion. While house styles encourage professionalism in fashion writing they are of disadvantage to a journalist’s writing freedom, with journalists being more or less forced to adapt their writing to the style of the publication.