Fashioning February: I'll Tumblr For Ya

New York Fashion Week kicked off last Thursday in its usual fine style and while the world"s fashionistas were tottering around the Big Apple, 24 bloggers were were flown to New York City courtesy of Tumblr where they will be treated to nine days of endless fashion shows, lunches, dinners, cocktails and meetings with various designers. Nice work if you can get it eh? It seems that since its inception four years ago Tumblr has developed a love affair with fashion and vice versa. In 2005 if you were a blogger unless you had your own URL chances you were on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad. Over the last years a few more blogging platforms have come into the domain such as OnSugar, Posterous and Xanga but it is Tumblr that has got everyone buzzing. The platform came to prominence when outraged employees from Newsweek used it to fight back against the closure of the paper. When the well respected publication announced plans to merge with The Daily Beast, employees of Newsweek created a Tumblr page stating Save Newsweek.com, this gained immense interest from the media and public and caused Tina Brown the owner of The Daily Beast to announce that Newsweek was here to stay.

Described as a digital dump, Tumblr has become not only popular with teenagers but also with fashion brands. The creativity of fashion companies means that they are not short of vibrant images so that makes it an ideal space. No surprise that more and more fashion PR and marketing directors are including Tumblr into their digital marketing mix to run alongside Facebook and Twitter. Designers such as Kate Spade, Oscar de la Renta and Alexander McQueen have all created hip blogs on Tumblr. Along with personal style bloggers who have launched a secondary blog to go with their more text heavy one and fashion industry people such as Oliver Zahn who is editor of Purple Fashion and photographer, Terry Richardson. More importantly huge fashion bibles such as Vogue and Elle have launched Tumblrs. While Twitter is adored by those who have a way with words, Tumblr is for those who are visually stimulated. However, what makes the platform stand out is the reblogging function (similar to retweeting) which gives the brands more impetus. Rich Tong, fashion director from Tumblr demonstrated the company's relevancy by his presence at New York Fashion Week where he took part in panels such as Fashion and Beauty Blog Conference aka FABB hosted by Lucky magazine and the IFB Evolving Influence conference. It looks like Tumblr is now the new fashion accessory.