It's no secret that capturing the attention of online readers is becoming increasingly difficult. This shift is especially prevalent in fashion as editors, bloggers, and brand writers compete for the attention of readers; traditional fashion magazines no longer own style advice.
Emily Ramshaw, Senior Editor of the popular online lifestyle site The Coveteur has been at the forefront of this shift. Ramshaw was a news editor at Flare Magazine before she joined the Coveteur two years ago.
Ramshaw tells me that today's editors have to constantly have a pulse on what their readers want.
Photo credit: Kavi Guppta
Tell me about writing about people's closets.
Once you've seen inside someone's home and looked (and played! -- which is essentially what styling these stories entails) at their favourite things, you come back with a very intimate perspective regarding who that person is.
The role of the fashion editor is to deliver content that readers want. How do you listen to your readers? Give a recent example.
To me the most important job of a journalist, writer and editor is constantly to be thinking about the readers: what do they want? What are they interested in? Will they get something out of this? Why is this story valuable to them in their day-to-day life -- even if the value is just to make them laugh or think, and not to actually get something concrete out of it.
We get a lot of feedback from readers via social media on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. But the most meaningful feedback is in person, which I get a lot of, often about obsessions over recent closets, or people they'd love to see on the site -- I get a LOT of that. Elton John was a recent suggestion...
Describe the evolution of influence in fashion. Have we lost individual style preference?
People often ask me what's "in" this season, and I'm usually at a loss. In that sense, I think style is more individual; we are generally more inspired by other people's style than by trends on the runway. Street style during fashion week is probably more telling of the state of fashion and what's "trendy" than what's being presented at the actual shows, for better or for worse.
I think that with Instagram and blogs, we've developed something of a "global taste" - -I never thought I would want to wear Sam Smith Adidas or chokers again, and here I am. But I also think traditional trends -- like only skinny fitted pants are in style this season -- have disappeared.
Follow Emily on Twitter, and check out her interviews on The Coveteur.
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