This week, the New York Times published an article on the recent influx of beauty bloggers backstage during fashion week. “Far from the glamour of the front row," one blogger tells the newspaper, "we’re in amongst the crowded space backstage. We’re the ones looking bedraggled from constantly getting in the way. Hair dryers are blasted in our faces.” Poor girl. This is a concept that actual beauty editors from the top fashion publications are all too familiar with and have been doing for quite some time. Herewith, a series of veterans with their responses on the backstage blogger invasion. Obviously, they were smart enough to keep it anonymous.
1. "Going backstage to cover hair, makeup, and now, nails is hardly a novel concept — we've been doing it for years; but you'd never know from reading the story. Sure, bloggers contribute to overcrowding backstage, but so do editors. The only 'news' in this article is that, shocker, beauty writing exists online."
2. "Being backstage is not a new thing. It's a concept that's been around since before the tents at Bryant Park existed; when Cindy Crawford did her own makeup. We're not trying to say that beauty editors do it better, it's just that bloggers aren't reinventing the wheel. The more people who cover beauty, who are passionate about it, the better. Especially when it's done in a smart way, but when people are doing it as a status thing, it just clogs up the space."
3. " Editors and bloggers are all asking the same questions backstage, and the answers necessarily become sort of canned after…the first five minutes. So being backstage is less important to an editor. What I want as a reader of a backstage blogger or tweeter is dirt, to be honest: Did someone lose it and start screaming expletives? Which model was drunk? But beauty bloggers are not so much with that info."
4. "Ever since Linda Wells launched Allure magazine, beauty editors have been diligently covering the beauty looks backstage. I scratch my head that a paper like the Times would think this is a new, novel concept."
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Filed Under:
beauty
,beauty editors
,beauty bloggers
,fashion week
,new york fashion week fall 2013
,beauty editor coalition