As designers prepare to show their clothes at Ottawa Fashion Week, organizers are expecting the event to attract more than 7,000 and are attributing the growth of the event partly to fashion bloggers.
The event, which runs Feb.17-19, has steadily grown in size since its debut five years ago. Its first season attracted just 250 people, but last fall 5,000 people attended the shows that unveiled 2012 spring and summer clothing lines.
“When Ottawa Fashion Week first started the most exposure we received was from local bloggers and online journalists,” says Christine Achampong, public relations director for Ottawa Fashion Week.
She says that as ticket sales have increased, so too have the number of bloggers coming in from out of town.
This weekend, media will be filling 35 per cent of the seats, and more than half that number will be bloggers, says Achampong.
“It’s a great way of gauging how much this event has grown,” she says.
An increasing number of fashion bloggers are being granted media passes to fashion weeks world-wide, giving them access to priority seating and the opportunity to interview designers about their collections – a privilege formerly reserved for professional members of the traditional media.
For this reason, bloggers are sometimes not as well received as they have been in Ottawa.
“A lot of people within the industry don’t like the fact that fashion is so accessible to everyone,” says Achampong. “Because anyone can self-publish, anyone can be a critic – whether you actually know what you’re talking about or not.”
Marilou Moles is the blogger behind Twenty York Street, an Ottawa blog focused on fashion and lifestyle.
When she writes and posts pictures about Ottawa Fashion Week, her posts reach the 380 subscribers to her blog, more than 1,600 followers on Twitter and more than 500 fans on Facebook.
Despite the negative attention bloggers sometimes receive for their lack of formal education in either fashion or journalism, Moles argues that the role of bloggers is not that different from journalists, and says blogging opens more options for coverage of fashion shows than does the traditional media.
“Although mainstream media have provided adequate coverage (of past fashion weeks), bloggers were able to cover more angles, more frequently, and on top of that, the tweets and Facebook posts more than widens this exposure by a hundredfold,” Moles says.
Erica Wark is another fashion blogger who covers the Ottawa fashion circuit. With a degree in journalism, she started a personal blog in 2010 that includes coverage of fashion from New York, Ottawa and Toronto.
“Bloggers give a change to up-and-comers who may not have the connections yet in the industry to be written and talked about,” she says.
With such an influence in exposing Ottawa’s small fashion industry to the world, Achampong says OFW organizers have every intention of keeping bloggers on their media lists.
This season’s shows will be held at the Westin Hotel Confederation Ballroom.