The Sartorialist window in Holt Renfrew, Toronto, Canada
In Canada, there is a very chic department store chain called Holt Renfrew, loosely connected (by family) to our Selfridges here in London, it has the same smart, designer vibe. Last week the company put six of what it thinks of as the most important global fashion bloggers in its window scheme for this month in all its stores country wide.
The windows have caused a torrent of press in the US, with WWD, The New York Tmes, USA today and all sorts of fashion savvy press reporting excitedly on the event. And of course the bloggers own sites have been wild with the news as have their Twitterings, when you get a handful of globally read bloggers sites stirred up then you really do create a lot of 'noise'.
Sadly The Womens Room was not one of the chosen six, but the list included one of our favourites, The Sartorialist, as well as Sea of Shoes, iwantigot.geekgirl, and Garance Dore . The creative director of Holt Renfrew, John Gerhardt stated that bloggers are "The new fashion celebrities, we've had designers and models and now it's the turn of the blogger". It is really interesting to us that bloggers have made such a great impact here, it's not the first time they've been used in a window scheme (The Sartorialist has been featured in New York windows) but it is the first time they've created such an impact. So I think we can officialy say bloggers are hot news for fashion.
John Gerhardt also said that he thought bloggers were intitiating a "Democratisation of fashion comment", Move over traditional fashion editors and hello to the The Women's Room and everyone like us is what we say. And we're ready with our window plan any time anyone's interested…