Will ended his blog A Suitable Wardrobe last year. I believe it was the largest on classic menswear out there. Now it is not completely clear, who has the lead. This is mainly due to a rising number of rapid Tumblr blogs and Instagram accounts, which compete for attention with traditional menswear blogs like Will’s (and my own). True, Tumblrs and Instagramers communicate through images mainly. To a lesser extent they use the written word, save a few Tumblr blogs for instance the eminent Die, Workwear! Nonetheless these new channels conquer attention in the field of classic menswear, and it is great if we speak about a Tumblr like Voxsartoria, which is an outstanding image source. That said I cannot really see how slow menswear blogs combining text and images will disappear or even shrink. They are able to transmit knowledge, which the agile image machines cannot do.
Hugo Jacomet of Parisian Gentleman is one of the leading bloggers from my own Blogspot and WordPress generation, who believes in writing as well. He was in Pitti Uomo in June wearing French haute couture tailoring, probably Cifonelli.
Simon Crompton of Permanent Style is another top WordPress blogger on fine classic menswear. Possibly he is closest to Will’s throne, if it makes sense to talk about that position today. In Pitti Uomo I saw him wearing a tobacco brown linen suit from Spanish tailor Langa.
Fabio Attanasio of The Bespoke Dudes is a fairly new, yet apparently mighty blogger in classic menswear. He is based in Italy. Like other people in the trade he is aware that it can be a good idea to sport clothing yourself in front of cameras like mine to get the message through. He seems to have created an ingenious mixture of WordPress, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook communications. I got a picture of Fabio in Pitti Uomo, when he was wearing an offwhite linen suit, a straw hat, tassel loafers, and his beloved phone.
Photos: The Journal of Style
Few of these so-called ‘mighty bloggers’ have any original or interesting content. The ones you pasted above all have some gravitas but Will’s ASW is sorely missed.
For those that care for these sort of things: web traffic is tough to measure from the outside, so it can be difficult to tell who is the ‘leader’. One thing that can be easily quantified, though, is the number of people subscribing to a site’s RSS feed with Google Reader. Reader makes this information public, in fact – just click on “show details” for any given blog and you can see.
True. Will’s blog was outstanding and surely had journalistic qualities. Probably because it was all about the topic itself. Also, his way of communicating was so elegant and refined with a lot of reflections. I am happy they exist, but unfortunately quite some menswear blogs lead the attention to the blogger himself, e.g. Parisian Gentleman. It’s a pity (Pitti?) journalistic criteria have not found their way to more blogs. But then again journalism is all about being independent and critical.
Thanks for this posting with some reflection about “the scene”, Torsten.
‘But then again good journalism is all about being independent and critical.’
And there in lies the problem. It is definitely above my paygrade to write on the ethics of these bloggers but it is patently obvious to anyone with a decent IQ, that a lot of them shill for certain retailers to get freebies.
Parisian Gentleman does not deserve my attention – they have too many publications which are suspicious for payed advertisement – for example their Sartoria Formosa publications.
Check Gentleman Gazette – they have interesting unique material. They also do some advertisement for their online shop, but in much more subtle and acceptable way.