When photos of the new Bitten Sarah Jessica Parker line ended up on the web, Steve & Barry's sent out cease & desist letters to bloggers. The question is: why?
It’s a brave new Internet world and the traditional fashion press machine seems either to not have grasped that concept, or would simply prefer to ignore it.
US budget chain Steve & Barry's recently launched the press blitz for the new "Bitten Sarah Jessica Parker" line, promising an exclusive preview of the line to Oprah and other traditional long-line media outlets. However, the new Fashionista blog (edited by Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker.com) published photos intended for print publications, and a fashion tempest erupted. Steve & Barry’s legal eagles contacted Fashionista to remove the pix, which they did - but by that time other blogs had already begun reposting them, making them widely reposted & easily accessible. One such blog, the widely read & influential The Budget Fashionista obtained the pix circulating in the public domain, and ran them with a less than glowing review.
Steve & Barry's attorneys contact TBF, explaining the photos were "wrongfully obtained" from a password protected area of the Bitten site not open to the public, and they need to be taken down. Not only did TBF not sneak photos off a site illegally, but it’s time for the traditional media to wake up: this is the age of the Internet, and once the fashionable cat is out of the bag, it's out. Times have changed. If exclusivity was that important, they should never have put them on the web, sending them instead as a CD or DVD-ROM instead of being so clueless.
Interestingly, fashion firms crave coverage of their products from the blogs because they are so widely & enthusiastically read by a loyal readership; however, they tend to forget that unlike traditional magazines with a specific "voice" and a faceless masthead, bloggers are real people - with real opinions (which companies could probably benefit from) – as are their readers, who love to share their opinions and comments. "I always thought SJP had great personal style, now I see she had a great personal stylist!" reads one comment on the Fashionista blog, reports WWD. "They look a lot like those clothes she modeled for those Gap ads she did a while back, especially those cuffed jeans!" As a prominent fashion blogger, it’s particularly irksome when certain large & influential PR firms (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) send bloggers hard-sell pitches, but then refuse to give any of us a decent seat at one of their fashion shows during Fashionweek, or even invite any of us to fancy product launches or events, limiting the invite list to (dinosaur) print editors only.
Unlike the blogs, long-line media is beholden to their roster of advertisers; it's specious (on their part) to talk about their "editorial" content, when in truth, it should probably come with an "advertorial" warning label.
