I strongly believe in the power of blogs

On June 6th, we will celebrate the first Fashion Blogger Day in Vienna together with stylekingdom.com and “unit f büro für mode”, during the 9 festival of fashion and photography. The Fashion & Style Icon Diane Pernet work close with the Festival to premiere her “A shaded view on Fashion Film” in Vienna and at the Fashion Blogger Day, Diane is part of the “Fash Clash – discussing the digital controversy” Panel. The Fashion 2.0 Pioneer talked with Maria from stylekingdom.com about Blogs, Austrian Designers, the ASVOFF Festival and more.

Can you remember your first steps into web 2.0 and what was your motivation behind starting A Shaded View On Fashion?

I started A Shaded View on Fashion in February 2005, at that time most of the blogs were political. A friend, Anina.net, introduced me to lifeblogging, this was so new at that time that SFR, my carrier had no idea what it was and it passed through their system. The idea was that you could post onto your site directly from your phone. Total cinema verity. The height of my life blogging experience was when Mark Eley of Eley Kishimoto asked me to make the road movie for the launch of his menswear collection. This was the 3,000 miles in 6 days Gumball 3000 and in addition to filming an intimate road movie, which you can see on my blog as Adventure of Pleasure, I life blogged from London to Monte Carlo. It was quite wild and also quite expensive. I think my phone bill was something like 800 EUROS. After a year or two of life blogging I decided it was a bit of a gimmick and that I could take higher resolution images with my digital camera instead of my phone. Prior to my own site I already had my place on the internet, first with Disciple Films where I had a section called Diane’s Diaries, then with Elle.com where I reported on the shows and did designer profiles for the international Elle.com site for about 3 1/2 years and then the same for Vogueparis.fr for several years. I decided to start my own site and to cover what I found interesting in the worlds of fashion, film, art, culture, travel and music.

You´re the co-founder of the internet platform IQONS which connects creative of the fashion industry. Thinking about the beginning of your career the conditions of getting in touch with creative must have been very different then. How did you experience it?

I was not the co-founder of IQONS, Rafael Jimenez was one of the two co-founders and when he started the site he said that it was not possible to do it without me since I was a reference already on the internet. The idea behind it is great but the reality is I think the mechanics of a site like Facebook works much better. More than anything the problem was not enough of an investment in the technology of the site. Things have changed tremendously over the past decades because of the internet . For instance now if I want to find a photographer in Vienna, or forgot the name of one I already knew, all I have to do is post a message on Facebook and in a few minutes I have the contacts of the people I knew and also links to great portfolios. That was the idea behind IQONS but it was not as successful as we would have liked it to be , more than anything it was just not user friendly enough. Everything took too many manipulations for one connection. However it still goes on and maybe they will put more money into the technology and gain a better foothold in the world of the web. I hope so because the idea was great and I enjoyed involving many talented creative in the beginning when we launched the site. I have not worked with them for more than a year and recently Rafael Jimenez, the real creative power behind the site, left.

What do you think about the future of blogs in general? Will they substitute print media or complement them?

I strongly believe in the future of blogs they offer a platform and create interaction between vast audiences around the planet. Blogs have a much larger reach than most print magazines and because of that all magazines, so it seems, have now created their own blogs. Some are more successful than others like Cathy Horyn for the New York Times. I think that print and the cyber world can support each other. I don’t think the internet needs a magazine, however we put one together as a support for the IQONS site, and it worked quite well, but print cannot exist without the web. That said , there are exceptions like Magazine (in Paris) the owner , Angela Cirimele, does not believe in the internet at all and prefers to only make a print magazine that talks about other magazines and offers very interesting editorials. I believe that print magazines will become more a place for reflection which is less what the internet is about. Thing is magazines can never report anything before the internet because we all have time constraints, even a daily newspaper cannot be first anymore. So for now, I would be happy to see the two supports each other but my primary interest is definitely the internet.

The number of fashion blogs on the internet is rapidly growing and publishing houses as well as brands have discovered advertising on blogs as a future market. Do you think this will endanger the freedom of speech like we´ve seen it in the past with print media?

There is always the danger that advertisers want to control the content of a site. The nature of a blog is to base it on authenticity therefore if one chooses their advertisers based on the products and values that they believe in their authority should not become suspect.

What can we expect from your `A Shaded View on Fashion Film´- Festival which you are going to present in Vienna this year at the 9festival?

You will see an edited version of ASVOFF, the original launch was 3 days and included fiction, documentaries and 90 minutes of short films. What we will screen in Vienna is an hour long version. I attach a brief on the films that you will see and if you visit my site you can read more and if you need to you can download images from the press section of my site. The only Austrian film that is in the selection is a beautiful, silent, film for Petar Petrov that was originally done for SHOWstudio. The countries are listed with each of the films.

(click here for the full Film List)

Are there any Austrian fashion designers you like?

Of course, I like Petar Petrov, Ute Ploier, Florian Ladstatter, Peter Pilotto, Fabrics Interseason can we call Marios Schwab Austrian? He is half Austrian but living in London, Wendy & Jim, I’m impressed by the work of the designers participating in the competition but I do not want to single out one above an other at this point.

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Diane Pernet will attend at the 9 festival for fashion and photography Symposium “Fash Clash – discussing the dgital controversy” and she also host the Viennese Premiere of “A shaded view on Fashion Film” . More about the 9 festival coming soon.
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