“New York Fashion Week’s casting was the most diverse it’s ever been this September. Tome’s Spring 2018 collection was presented on an assortment of people not typically featured on the runway.” At first sight, the incorporation of the fact might not be clearly evident in numbers and figures, but it is furthermore presented through the hyperlink “the most diverse it’s ever been” that links to a report on Refinery29. Hyperlinks are common practice when writing for online, as this makes it easier for fashion journalists to comply with the given word count of the publication. For Rocamora, hyperlinks are of benefit to fashion journalists; they see no limitations...
“New York Fashion Week’s casting was the most diverse it’s ever been this September. Tome’s Spring 2018 collection was presented on an assortment of people not typically featured on the runway.”
At first sight, the incorporation of the fact might not be clearly evident in numbers and figures, but it is furthermore presented through the hyperlink “the most diverse it’s ever been” that links to a report on Refinery29. Hyperlinks are common practice when writing for online, as this makes it easier for fashion journalists to comply with the given word count of the publication. For Rocamora, hyperlinks are of benefit to fashion journalists; they see no limitations or restrictions in internal and external linking and are also used to refer to other relevant discussions within the given topic.
In addition to incorporating facts within an article, Sykes’ writing also reflects the importance of a feature having a peg and an angle. While the former refers to the topicality of the story, by highlighting why “the reader should be interested in this issue now” the latter links to a question, an overall idea, seen in Sykes’ stand-first “Is the fashion industry finally recognizing a less binary version of diversity?”. In this context, already being crucial elements of fashion writing in print, peg and angle remain important when it comes to writing for online.
With authenticity as the main element of fashion writing in digital media, it interferes with traditional norms of journalism, as I have argued in Chapter One, specifically the one of journalistic objectivity. However, it has become a signifying element in fashion writing for the online space. Evident in Sykes’ article, she “inserts [herself] in the story” through her own impression as she writes in the last paragraph “Agency-signed pro or ‘non model’ doesn’t matter so much as the message: there isn’t one single kind of beauty. And what I hope is that these changes, however minutely, will help to change fashion’s narrow view of the ideal”.
