Do Fashion Editors Influences Manipulate Fashion Designers Collections - Essay Example

Expert Opinions, The Last Five Years of Fashion, and Fashion Editors
When one thinks “fashion,” immediately we think of all the big names in fashion: Donatella Versace, Vera Wang, Coco Chanel, Gucci, Yves St. Laurent, Ralph Lauren, Karl Lagerfeld, Emporio Armani. There are almost too many to name individually, really. But we are fans of Versace dresses and Vera Wang wedding gowns, Chanel perfume, Gucci purses, Yves St. Laurent and Ralph Lauren clothing, Karl Lagerfeld’s unusual fashion, and Emporio Armani suits and sunglasses. The last five years in fashion have seen a radical shift from impractical to more practical clothing—at least in stores. On the runways, it’s a different story, as emaciated models walk the catwalk, pose, turn, and leave. Fashion editors can be a dime a dozen these days with all the magazines out there churning out content, but their staying power has remained in the sense that they do all of the necessary vettings for the fashion industry.

The Pros
Two pros of fashion editors follow. First of all, fashion will be predictably selected if
just one editor is manipulating the collections. This means that every piece of clothing in a collection that is featured in the magazine is carefully chosen with delicate care. This is to ensure that the high-quality standards of the fashion industry are being met, according to the editor’s interest. The second reason this could be viewed as a positive is that fashions being publicized will be carefully selected beforehand, not allowing for any designer to just enter the industry without any kind of proper vetting.

The Cons
Two cons of having fashion editors follow, as to whether their manipulation of fashion collections can have a negative impact. First, newer fashion designers or those with little exposure may not have a way to get exposure if they are constantly being rejected by fashion magazines. One has to start somewhere. If a new designer’s line does not cater to the whimsy of the fashion editor, the piece on the new designer’s line might not get written, published, or shot—at all. The second worry about how fashion editors manipulate the industry is that fashion designers will not be able to succeed without being screened by an industry expert. Since the fashion world can be very picky about what it likes, the fashion editor serves as a kind of gatekeeper. Who is “in” (or popular) at the time is what en vogue, and if a type of fashion has been labeled a failure or unpopular, it could significantly damage that designer’s sales or marketing strategy.

Anna Wintour, “The September Issue,” and “The Devil Wears Prada”
Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Magazine, was something of a legend in the fashion world because of the way she could make or break a fashion collection. She was always searching for the newest and latest design or trend. “Wintour wanted a hipper, younger Leadership, and twenty-three-year-old Cleave, an Oxford graduate with a degree in art, was given the youth page beat—the same with-it demographic that Anna later targeted, likely on her father’s advice, when she first became a fashion editor.” Ms. Wintour was such the stuff of legend, that her figure was immortalized in “The September Issue,” and next, likened unto that of fashion editor Miranda Priestly in Lauren Weisberger’s break-out fashion chick-lit novel, The Devil Wears Prada. There was a lot of patronizing that went on behind the scenes at fashion magazines, and Ms. Priestly was no stranger to that atmosphere. In the fashion industry, particularly around editors, there is a hierarchy of workers who are striving to make names for themselves. “Emily had just been promoted to the position of senior assistant, leaving the junior assistant position open for me. She explained that she would spend two years as Miranda’s senior assistant, after which she’d be skyrocketed to an amazing fashion position at Runway.” By the end of the film, we see the main character—Miranda Priestly’s assistant—quit in the world of fashion, because it was ruining her personal life and taking up a lot of her time.

Conclusion
Without a doubt, we have been able to here explore: Anna Wintour as well as various spin-off movies that have been made in her honor. Hopefully, these fashion editors, “gatekeepers” of fashion, if you will—will be more lenient in the future in choosing who will appear on the pages of their magazines.