Fashion Meets Public Relations: How Blogs Boost Fashion’s PR

by: Dorothy Griffith

Dying to know who designed the clothes from your favorite television show? Looking for a lower cost alternative to that knockout dress from last week’s episode?

You can find just about all the information you want on your favorite outfits from various fashion and pop culture blogs online. These blogs feature clothes from popular shows, where they can be purchased, and often, lower cost alternatives.

One such blog “for the fashionably compulsive” is possessionista.com. Dana Weiss, the brains behind this fashion forward blog, said in an email interview that her site was “really a resource, so the people who are coming to visit Possessionista are looking for these pieces.”

Her blog is not the only one that provides this service, however. A simple Google search of “clothes from Pretty Little Liars,” for example, yields 1,790,000 results of pages similar to Weiss’, which focus on fashion trends in popular television and pinpoint where to purchase them.

Weiss said she generally gets very positive comments about the clothes that she features on her blog. The biggest complaint she gets, though, is about the prices of many of the high-fashion pieces that appear on many shows. Because of this feedback, she features less expensive options on her blog that are similar, but never exact copies.

“There are shows like Gossip Girl that I always offer looks for less, but I’m careful to choose items that are inspired, but never replicas,” she said. “I think it’s important to respect the creativity of designers, and knockoffs are just stealing someone else’s originality.”

But how does the work of Weiss and others like her affect the fashion industry? Weiss said that these sites and blogs serve as a means of free positive public relations for many of the shows and fashion designers.

Simply by being featured on a show, a brand is given exposure that they might not have previously had. “I think that these brands have target audiences, and through television you have a captive audience,” Weiss said. “Unlike a paid advertisement, these clothes have been handpicked by a stylist, giving a sort of seal of approval.”

With the increasing popularity of blogs and websites such as these, the average TV watcher can become a style icon with just the click of a button. What’s more fashionable than that?