March 28, 2024

New York Fashion Week: On Tumblr, a Community for Style

She later dropped by Tumblr’s Gramercy Park offices in New York, where Mr. Tong introduced her to Jamie Beck, a fashion photographer with her own Tumblr blog, fromme-toyou.tumblr.com. The two set up a photo shoot. Mr. Tong asked Oscar de la Renta, one of the first luxury fashion brands to have a Tumblr, OscarPRGirl.tumblr.com, to provide the gowns.

The resulting photographs, animated images that Ms. Beck calls “cinemagraphs,” featured an elegant Ms. Rocha in her New York apartment flicking her kohl-lined eyes or letting a balcony breeze tousle her hair. They were posted on Ms. Rocha’s blog, oh-so-coco.tumblr.com, reblogged or “liked” about 40,000 times, and viewed countless times by fashion fans around the world.

“For the most part, it’s great having things online,” Ms. Beck, 28, said of the high-fashion shoots she posts using Tumblr. “It can be shared. Ninety percent of my work isn’t a super masterpiece, but if I can reach people who can appreciate it, then it’s successful.”

Tumblr, founded four years ago, has reached out to the fashion community in a way no other social networking site has. For the second time, it has brought users to New York Fashion Week as reporters, paying for their trips and giving them access to the shows. Their coverage is being posted on a dedicated channel, tumblr.com/NYFW, made up of posts from 20 bloggers picked by Tumblr’s staff, along with contributions from magazines that have their own Tumblrs, like Vogue, GQ, T Magazine and Glamour.

Formerly a pileup of profanity-laced teenage ramblings and partly expressed emotions, at least to an outsider’s eye, Tumblr has become an image-driven platform of importance to fashion photographers — like Terry Richardson (who uses it mostly as a diary) — brands and bloggers, who have made it an integral part of their online lives.

Tumblr hired Mr. Tong, who had previously founded Weardrobe.com, a community for those who chronicle their outfits online, as fashion director in December 2009, the first full-time position of its kind in the social networking sphere.

“When Tumblr took a look at the thousand blogs with the biggest followings on the platform, it found that 18 percent of them were fashion-related,” Mr. Tong said in a recent interview in Tumblr’s office. “My role exists because of what they wanted their competitive edge to be. Facebook and Twitter are generalist communities. They’re not trying to support the creative community. We thought, ‘What can we do to support this community?’ That’s where they saw the light.”

The traffic that came to the first tumblr.com/NYFW page in February “wasn’t as large as we’d hoped,” Mr. Tong said, due in part, he thinks, to lags in the site’s effort to cover shows in real time, and lack of awareness about Tumblr’s new specialty. “We’re hopeful we will be able to get better, more complete coverage and more first looks this year.”

To that end, Mr. Tong selected the bloggers not by how large their followings were, as he did in February, but based on what he called their “maturity” levels, and their focus on women’s wear, men’s wear, accessories or beauty. He interviewed them in person or on Skype. On Thursday, during Fashion’s Night Out, Tumblr sponsored a carnival-theme photo booth with Opening Ceremony (with photos uploaded on the store’s new blog, openingceremony.tumblr.com), and will host a cocktail party with GQ on Wednesday for a group of men’s wear bloggers.

But this month, fashion brands and marketing agencies criticized a Tumblr proposal for brands who might want to sponsor the site’s Fashion Week content. According to the proposal, Tumblr asked for $150,000 to sponsor the page for the week (and $350,000 for sponsoring Tumblr’s general fashion page, tumblr.com/tagged/fashion). It also requested upward of $10,000 for private events with the Tumblr-selected bloggers, not including the venue and other costs. Brands could also be guaranteed product placement in each of the blogs for an unlisted sum.

Marketing professionals said the cost of the ads was outrageous because Tumblr doesn’t provide the analytics to justify them.

“This is a potentially serious issue for Tumblr because the fashion community is the one community, seemingly, that Tumblr wishes to court above all others,” wrote Raman Kia, the head of digital marketing at Starworks Group, which represents luxury brands, on his blog, thesocialwarrior.com.

“Our team cares tremendously about the brands that have embraced our community in full force, and we’re incredibly excited about the early success we’ve had with our partners so far,” Katherine Barna, Tumblr’s head of communications, wrote in a statement. “They’ve been overwhelmingly supportive of the fact that these are alpha products and understand that we’re constantly overhauling and iterating in the interest of building the best products we can for our community.”

Fashion brands did start Tumblrs seemingly en masse, following the start of Oscar de la Renta’s, written by the brand’s vice president for communications, Erika Bearman, in December 2010. McQ, Kate Spade and J. Crew began using the platform, as did Thakoon and Jason Wu. “We need more European brands,” Mr. Tong said. Stefano Gabbana has one,

stefanogabbana.tumblr.com, but he posts mainly photos from his cellphone.

The fashion photographers who use it say that their Tumblrs make dedicated portfolio sites unnecessary. Based on her Tumblr, Ms. Beck was hired to shoot a cinemagraph campaign for Juicy Couture to begin in September and will be photographing a story for Tory Burch during Fashion Week. “I had no idea that people would be paying me to shoot stories on my blog,” said Ms. Beck, who started her Tumblr blog in May 2009 and has 150,000 followers. “I never had any thought of that. But it quickly became that.”

“I don’t like it when I meet people and they don’t have a Tumblr,” she added. “That’s the best business card.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=85cbf2b2a51705c445a21bd2a9908f42

The Fiat 500 Hopes for a Rebirth in the U.S. Market

Fiat owns Chrysler, which it bought as part of Chrysler’s government-sponsored bankruptcy two years ago. Now Fiat is using its Chrysler foothold in this country to sell one of its own cars — the Fiat 500 — for the first time since 1983, when it officially left the market.

Lucky for Fiat, few Americans seem to remember Fiat or its past reputation for low quality, which sent sales plunging from a high of 100,511 in 1975 to 14,113 in 1982.

The company’s new “500” hatchback is being welcomed, in the words of one analyst, as a “fashion statement” among many new car buyers. Last month, the teeny car, whose trim lines include “Pop” and “Lounge,” essentially matched the sales of its chief competition, the Mini Cooper.

Fiat’s 101st dealership — the carmaker calls them “studios” and many are nestled in fashionable shopping districts rather than on sprawling suburban lots — opened on Wednesday in Miami, and the full network of 130 across the country is expected to be in operation by year’s end. The 500 also will be in the spotlight at the New York Fashion Week next week, when a red-and-green-striped Gucci version will be unveiled.

“As a new vehicle, it seems to me the launch would have to be viewed as a success,” Jeremy Anwyl, the chief executive of the automotive research Web site Edmunds.com, said. “The big challenge for the 500 is staying competitive.” He added: “Fashion tends to be ephemeral — it’s fickle. People move on.”

For the moment, at least, the 500 is the center of attention in the industry’s diminutive segment at a time when high gas prices and consumers’ interest in downsizing have turned small cars into big sellers. Fiat predicts sales of small cars will double in volume by 2014, and it hopes to capitalize in a way that Chrysler, which specializes in the larger end of the market, could not on its own.

“It’s an exceedingly well-built car — very functional, fun to drive and very roomy,” said Paul Locigno, a 63-year-old retired consultant in Virginia, who bought a 500 this spring, when he and his wife were looking for something smaller and less thirsty than their pickup truck. “I get a lot of gawkers on the road, people coming up to you asking what it is.”

The 500 might be novel to many Americans, but it has been a fixture in Europe since 1957. The version available to North American drivers, built in Mexico with engines from Michigan, was altered with their tastes in mind. Changes include a stronger suspension, a climate control system suited for more extreme temperatures, and the option of an automatic transmission.

“We didn’t just ship a car over that was successful in Europe,” said the head of Fiat in North America, Laura Soave, a first-generation Italian-American whose family has a photograph of her standing on the hood of a 500 at the age of 3.

Bringing the Fiat brand to the United States with a single model that sells for less than $19,000 on average represents a big bet for the company’s chief executive, Sergio Marchionne, as well as for dealers, who were asked to spend considerably to build separate showrooms for a car with unknown potential.

Even with the early excitement, there have been problems. Filling in Fiat’s dealership network has taken longer than the company anticipated, and sales in the early going fell short of expectations. Shares of Fiat dropped in Italy recently after Ms. Soave acknowledged that full-year sales in North America would come in below the company’s goal of 50,000; its totals through July were about 8,000 in the United States and fewer than 4,000 in Canada.

But many of the new Fiat dealers predict the kinks will be worked out. Dealers, most of whom also sell the four domestic brands in Chrysler’s stable, report numerous 500 buyers have traded in cars from Toyota, Honda, Mini, Volkswagen and even foreign luxury brands like Lexus.

“They’re doing a lot of things right, and Sergio is a phenomenal car guy,” said Rick Case, who opened a Fiat studio on July 1 in his former Smart car showroom near Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “What he’s done with Chrysler, most people consider it a miracle.”

Mr. Case’s store sold 58 of the 500 models in its first month, more than any other dealer nationwide, and he expects to consistently sell about 100 a month starting next year, which he said would make for a comfortably profitable business.

Mr. Case has an impressive track record for signing on with up-and-coming makers of small, fuel-efficient cars, and was among the first in this country to sell Toyotas, Hondas and Hyundais. He approached Fiat because he sensed similar potential, though he concedes it will never produce the volume of Hyundai, whose sales in the United States topped half a million last year.

“A lot of people are being drawn to it because it’s cute, because it’s fuel-efficient, because it’s a fun car,” he said.

Those attributes are bringing in buyers that Chrysler has historically struggled to attract. “This is a customer that they haven’t seen in a long time,” said Ms. Soave, the Fiat executive.

In addition to the hatchback and convertible on sale now, dealers will have a high-powered “Abarth” and an electric version of the 500 next year. Fiat is also planning a second, slightly larger model in the years ahead, but has not given a specific timeframe.

Fiat has worked to attract male drivers in the United States, with a “sport” version that offers more aggressive performance and styling. Men account for 64 percent of Fiat 500 buyers in North America but only 30 percent in Europe, where no sport trim is available. Fifty-seven percent of buyers here have chosen the sport trim, and most of those cars have come equipped with manual transmission, despite Americans’ overwhelming preference for automatics.

Ms. Soave said buyers tend to be either young or old, with fewer in their 40s and 50s, the age group where most mainstream brands are strongest. Among the strongest markets for Fiat has been Texas, a state whose penchant for brawny trucks would seem to make for a tough sell of a car less than 12 feet long.

“We don’t all own oil wells and swimming pools here in Texas,” said Nyle Maxwell, who opened Fiat of Austin in March and was the brand’s top-selling dealer in May and June. His staff sells the 500 from a storefront in the Domain, a fashionable outdoor mall anchored by Neiman Marcus, and serves customers from his Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram store five miles away.

“We’re selling as many convertibles as we can get our hands on,” Mr. Maxwell said. “The halo it will create should help the other brands as well. It’s got a lot of upside.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4756b0e08d0d448516565aab62db560d