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Recently I’ve been seeing posts on TikTok in which young fashion journalists/content creators lament the gated nature of the industry. Their critiques tend to be that more senior people in the industry often don’t want to help young people, whom they regard as not knowledgable enough about fashion to have a place in it or valid opinion on it. Their opinions aren’t worthwhile, industry veterans have made clear, because they haven’t been, say, invited to the Dior couture show for the past 20 years. The message is that they aren’t in league with the establishment, therefore they have no business positioning themselves as people with worthwhile analysis and coverage of this industry.
The question here is a simple one that has dogged fashion since the freakout over bloggers in the aughts: Who gets to be an authority in fashion today? Frankly, it doesn’t matter how the establishment feels about young new creators gaining followings and clout on TikTok. Because authority, in fashion and many other journalistic beats, is granted to those with an audience, and those who can’t effectively communicate to an audience in 2022 will find their authority eroded, no matter how many elite fashion shows they’ve been invited to or what knowledge they have stored away about Tom Ford’s Gucci collections.
