Although they deal with trends, traditional fashion magazines have a weighty permanence. With their stiff spines and glossy appearance, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, W., and the like demand to be taken seriously. Their carefully styled photo spreads and confident, demanding text (“Feathers are the new black!”) give the impression that the fashion editors, also known for their stiff spines and glossy appearances, have bestowed upon you everything you need to know this very minute. As soon as a designer launches another collaborative line with a rebel conceptual artist, or stages a show for an imaginary season (pre-fall, resort), the magazine will be out of date. In the mean time, the editors have handed you a shiny key into the world of fashion.
Fashion magazines are very difficult to throw out.
But change is on every horizon. Teenage bloggers can challenge the status quo of fashion media and, in the process, launch their own empires. The internet has helped fashion followers feel like more than passive followers. Not only do we have spaces to have our opinions heard (where once all you could do was write a letter to the editor), but sites like Pinterest and Tumblr allow us to act like editors, curating images to advertise our interests and tell our stories.
The newest program in this democratization of fashion is called Glossi. With it you can create a virtual magazine on any subject. While Tumblr lets you share images in the traditional scroll-down website format, Glossi allows you to layout pictures and small blocks of texts on ‘pages’ that you then you ‘flip’ through. Just as Kindle’s and e-readers continue to rip off the visuals of traditional books while endangering their existence, Glossi pays tribute to a paper-bound publication while bypassing the need for a printer. Even its title invokes the glossy, thick pages of the luxury mags that continue to go out of business.
“The magazine format is an emotionally involving format,” Glossi CEO Matt Edelman told the New York Times. “It really evokes interest, passion and conversation in a way that the blog doesn’t.”
The interesting next step will be if they can find a way to print the magazines, at least a sole copy for the creators.
Glossi hopes a lot of companies, particularly fashion labels, use the tool to create specialized online catalogues for their products. But the average everyday internet user has already stormed the gates, despite the fact that the site still requires you to request an invitation to create a Glossi. With endless possibilities, what have your average everyday internet users chosen as the topics of their magazines? About what you’d expect–self-published steam punk novellas, grumpy cats, and Ryan Gosling. To each their own, but not everything that’s glossy is gold.
My initial concept for my magazine was a collection of my writing for Toronto Standard, but it didn’t take very long to learn that the text blocks that come on the pre-laid out pages are nowhere near big enough for actual articles. On your computer screen, a Glossi looks about the same proportions as a printed magazine, but as soon as you start adding text, you discover what every graphic designer knows–words need a lot more space.
Having given up on that project, I began uploading pictures I liked from Tumblr (men with beards, photos from India, Joan Crawford). This was easy and fun, as you can load pictures to Glossi with links so you don’t need to save them to your desktop. Selecting pictures and figuring out where they should go does make you feel a bit like a fashion editor, but at some point I felt a pang of guilt. I had taken none of the photos I was using, nor did I know the proper credits for who did. It’s one thing to share images on places like Facebook and Tumblr, especially when you can trace them back to an original source and you’re not taking credit for them. But the change in layout made it that much clearer that I was using pictures without knowledge of the photographers and artists.
So maybe the battle isn’t between Anna Wintour in her Condé Nast office and Tavi Gevinson on her laptop. The brewing online battle will be between the those who create content (writers, artists, musicians) and those who share it. We’re still working out the kinks of how to give online credit where credit is due, but it will get harder as the established publications that can afford to pay artists fade away. The democratization of the internet is wonderful and exciting, but a site like Glossi does beg the question– if everyone can be fashion editor, is anyone?
Click here to see my finished, experimental project.
____
Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
For more, follow us on Twitter @TorontoStandard or subscribe to our newsletter.
