Taylor Lorenz on the Future of Fashion Influencers

"This day of the faceless fashion assistant getting to have an impact on a magazine unfortunately just doesn't happen anymore. And there's no money in that print media world anymore."

In 2006, technology journalist Taylor Lorenz got an internship at Harper’s Bazaar. “I remember after college just thinking, OK, well, that's a dying industry. This is the most out of touch place I've ever been,” she recalled on a call this week. “No hate to Harper's Bazaar. I really love people that work there, but a lot of these companies haven't evolved very much, and I'm kind of shocked that they're still in business.”

Lorenz knows better than anyone why magazines like Bazaar don’t have the same influence they once did: there is just no way for them to compete with the creator industry that social media has birthed. She was one of the first journalists to take it seriously and turn it into a beat; I remember so clearly her 2018 Atlantic stories about how Instagram influencers were “driving luxury hotels crazy” and posting fake sponsored content for clout.

How online influence evolved from blogging to the quarter of a trillion dollar content creation industry we know today (which Goldman Sachs projects will double to a half trillion dollar industry by 2027) is the subject of Lorenz’s new book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, out Tuesday (remember, pre-ordering books is the best way to support authors, ideally from your local indie if you can).

“Online influence can make you an overnight Hollywood sensation, morph you into a powerful business leader, or take you to the White House,” writes Lorenz, now a columnist at the Washington Post. “Legacy institutions that refuse to adapt will continue to fade into oblivion.” The book is a delicious, fast-paced read that explores why some platforms and influencers have thrived while others have faded, and how fashion was in many ways at the forefront of harnessing online influence.

I talked to Lorenz this week about her book, how the fashion industry’s relationship to creators has evolved, and where it’s all going.

You talk in the book about how Julia Allison, one of the original influencers though we didn’t use that word at the time, burned out on living her life online. She was subjected to horrendous misogyny and harassment. Today, she’s in academia, living an offline life in Cambridge, Mass. Do you think we’ll see more burnout in the fashion influencer space?

It depends. I do think a lot of fashion creators have burned out over the years and also just been unable to evolve as platforms mature. Some of these OG fashion bloggers, like Lawrence Schlossman from Throwing Fits — he started [the blog] Fuck Yeah Menswear and now hosts the Throwing Fits podcast. So some of these characters have stuck around, but a lot of people do burn out, and a lot of people just kind of fade. It's not even that they can't deal with hate or harassment, they're just exhausted. And I think the older you get, keeping up a content career can be exhausting.

I appreciated how in the book, you highlight the amount of work these careers require. I find in the fashion industry, people can still be so dismissive of content creators (e.g. when critics made snide commentary about “influencer pits” at a Gucci show). When I read stuff like that, I’m kind of like, Well, what do you think is going to happen here? You’re going to bring back cable television and print? What’s your reaction to that kind of attitude?

It's always been so incredibly dismissive. At the same time, a lot of other sectors are even more dismissive. At least the fashion industry is doing influencer gifting and things like that. Traditional fashion media has always been this top-down thing, like, Oh, what does Vogue pick? The content creator ecosystem has circumvented that. And you see that democratization of media happening all over. Because of the elitism inherent to a lot of that old print fashion media, they're just very resentful of it, almost. Or they only approve of certain fashion creators. I've noticed they'll pick a few people that they deem worthy of engaging with, but then there's a lot of other creators that they basically just dismiss and will never acknowledge.

Taylor Lorenz (credit: Brian Treitler).

Do you see fashion as being ahead of the game when it comes to working with creators? I feel often like the industry is behind in that regard.

I agree with you in the sense that it's this archaic industry where they are so behind in so many ways. And I'm sure for people that work in it, it's frustrating. I would tell those people, try to spend one day in politics or some of these other sectors — they're even more behind. They're still debating whether the internet is a real thing. So in that sense, fashion is very ahead of the game.

I know a lot of people don't consider Nordstrom the peak of fashion, but I talk a lot in the book about how they embraced the influencer landscape very early and were able to really leverage it to drive sales [in part through their collaborations with Arielle Charnas aka Something Navy].

That’s scary that politics doesn’t get it — like, don’t they need to master it more than anyone?

It's actually disturbing. I’m having a book event in DC and I was just talking to a potential moderator and they said, “Well, don't you think social media is just a fad? People are getting sick of it. It's not going to last.” This is how so many people who are political journalists and also people in the political ecosystem think.

We all know DC is behind the times, but fashion in that sense is ahead of the game. Vogue putting “Instagirls” on the cover a decade ago — that's forward thinking in today's landscape.

Vogue’s September 2014 “Instagirls” cover.

I give Anna Wintour credit for not wanting to fall behind and trying not to, even if she doesn’t always execute perfectly. I kept thinking when I was reading your book about how the backdrop to the whole story is the fall of traditional outlets.

When you talk to media people about the rise of digital media, they think that it's Gawker and BuzzFeed and Vice that led to the death of print. And as we've seen in recent years, that is not actually what the real digital media revolution was. The real digital media disruption came from the content creator industry, which is this quarter of a trillion dollar industry that emerged in the past 10 to 15 years. That is what is taking people away from traditional media and what has led to the death of print. It's platforms like Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, and creators providing entertainment, information, product recommendations.

People used to have relationships with these media brands. Now people are much more likely to have relationships with specific people because they don't trust a faceless brand.

It’s unclear to me how these magazines can last much longer. My prediction is that they’ll just cut budgets so much that eventually the magazines will have to be made by a small group of influencers who come together two to four times a year to make a couple of issues.

I totally agree. I think they're going to have to embrace this creator-driven ecosystem. This day of the faceless fashion assistant getting to have an impact on a magazine unfortunately just doesn't happen anymore. And there's no money in that print media world anymore.

You interviewed longtime fashion influencer and former Bazaar editor Chrissy Rutherford for the book. She’s spoken frankly about how fashion magazines need to allow editors to take sponsored content deals, because many of them don’t or they have such restrictive policies that it doesn’t pay for the editor-influencers to keep working at magazines. So magazines end up driving away people who have a proven track record of being able to speak to an audience. How do you think magazines should handle this?

I think it's a huge loss for these magazines to not find a way to work with their most talented people. Traditional media has the same problem — you see so many talented people just leaving. Look at Vox, look at Cleo Abram or Johnny Harris. You had these incredible journalists who were creating a product, and ultimately there's so much of an upside for them to go independent that it just doesn't make sense to stay.

All media companies should find a way to keep these people in their fold because they've developed this really powerful relationship with audiences online, and those audiences are valuable. I just wish that it wasn't so cut and dry.

Let There Be Spon Con

I haven’t been an editor since early 2018. A lot has changed since then, but I remember that online creators — not necessarily her, but say a Charli D’Amelio type — seemed to desire very traditional coverage, like a spread in a print magazine. Do you think that’s still the case?

No. Even the D’Amelios, I don't think Charli gives a shit. I think it's Mark and Heidi, the parents, who want that traditional coverage because they're from a different generation.

I will say, it's valuable for brand deals. I used to work for People magazine, and I remember interviewing one content creator, and he's like, “I don't think people read People magazine anymore, but when I go to pitch myself to brands, I can say, ‘I've been in People,’ or, ‘I've been on the cover of Variety.’” So I think it's valuable when you're trying to talk to other people who are out of touch with the media environment and still consider these legacy places relevant.

But that has to change eventually, right?

I think it matters less and less every year. I would say getting a feature in the New York Times is sort of equal, for a lot of content creators, to maybe getting a really significant deal with Prada or some aspirational brand, and what that says about who you are. With a feature in the New York Times, there are significant downsides you can't control. I think brand partners are becoming those status markers.

You explain in the book how TikTok changed everything. How did TikTok change things specifically for fashion influencers?

One thing that TikTok has given birth to is analysis videos. One of my favorite creators is [Cyclical, Mandy Lee aka Old Loser in Brooklyn]. There are a lot more fashion commentators these days than there ever were on Instagram, which was more about projecting an aspirational lifestyle. On TikTok, you have people doing the more critical analysis, something more like fashion journalism.

Do you think social media followings will become portable? That’s what Meta claims is the whole idea behind Threads — that users can take their following from there to another platform.

We are in such a hyper-capitalist tech landscape that the reason Meta is doing that is because they don't want to get in trouble and get regulators riled up again where they're hit with antitrust allegations. Meta was very paranoid about that before TikTok came along. I think they've used TikTok to be like, “Look, we're not a monopoly.” But at the end of the day, it's TikTok, YouTube-slash-Google, and Meta that dominate today's social media landscape. I would love for [portable followings] to happen, but I think we're in such a profit-driven world that there's not an upside, so they're not very invested in it.

Where do you think Threads is going?

I wrote a story recently about how they just started wholesale blocking words from search that they don't want to moderate, which is crazy, like “covid” and “vaccine.” I was talking to a comms person, and they kind of implied that they might block any newsworthy term that they feel like they can't police. Say the war in Ukraine happened again, there's a solid chance that Threads would block the word “Ukraine.” I spoke to all these public health experts about it — it's incredibly dangerous. I have to say, as a news person, that's deranged. The whole value of Twitter is seeing these newsworthy events. As soon as newsworthy events happen, like a covid surge, you're blocking all of the main trending words associated with it.

I have so many problems with Instagram. I think they moderate the platform to such an insane degree. They're never going to be able to play a meaningful role in the news ecosystem again. They were so battered by the press after Cambridge Analytica and all the disinformation stuff around the 2016 election, that they're so scared of government regulators saying that they don't do enough. Now they've just ensured that it's not a place for breaking news because they block all of this stuff.

So basically, you don’t think an anodyne platform for, I don’t know, editors to Thread about where they’re having lunch at Milan Fashion Week is where the future of social media is at.

The problem is that everything is political now. Not now — it's always been that way. [Instagram head] Adam Mosseri’s statements, right after Threads launched, I thought were so revealing. He wants it to be this place for fun content, but fashion, sports, entertainment — all of these things that these tech executives think are somehow separate from politics and culture and tough issues are actually not. The culture is reflective of all of this stuff. So it's doomed.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter/X there was a flurry of stories about how fashion brands like Balenciaga left the platform. It made complete sense for them to leave, right?

A hundred percent. I can't even understand why anyone would still be on there, especially for fashion. Twitter is like a cesspool at the bottom of a gutter. So if you were any aspirational brand, I have no idea why you would spend a minute there.

I only have an account basically to message sources. It is just not useful to me, that's not where culture emerges. When Taylor Swift is with Travis Kelce, you go to TikTok for the pop-culture analysis.

If you were a fashion brand, how would you spend your marketing dollars?

I would spend a lot on developing deep relationships with specific content creators. Also, a bunch on influencer marketing and in-person events. I think people are always hesitant to do IRL events. I know they're expensive, but I do think using an event to make online moments happen can be good. I wouldn't be buying ads in Vogue, that's for sure.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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