Frankie's gold class - LMFF 2011

Frockwriter’s last LMFF was Friday night’s L’Oréal Paris Runway 6 showcase presented by Frankie magazine. Fantastic, upbeat show featuring some great Australasian brands, from Alice McCall to Karen Walker, Kate Sylvester, Alpha60, Dhini, Limedrop and Nevenka, with cool girl styling that perfectly reflected Frankie’s fresh-faced readership, courtesy Jolyon Mason. Not to mention some new faces, notably 17 year-old Gracie Holt (above), who opened the show and walked in four other shows last week. Modelling for just three months, Holt hails from Alice Springs – making her the second great new girl to emerge from the Red Centre in five months, after 16 year-old Melissa 'MJ' Johannsen, who made an impressive debut at New York Fashion Week last month. Expect to see a lot more of both. Click (here) to see frockwriter's Posterous pic gallery shot backstage during the show. 

Indie mags lead the RUSSH to social media

It's fascinating to witness the pace at which some are diving into social media. Not surprisingly perhaps, when it comes to Australian fashion magazine publishing, it's the independents who are leading the way. Without the resources of massive online portals such as ninemsn.com.au and news.com.au, to which the biggest titles have access, the indies are thinking outside the square. Here is a video just-posted by RUSSH magazine on its day-old Tumblr blog. It's a "vidflip" of issue 29. The blog and Vimeo account are on top of Facebook (4,349 fans) and MySpace (10,538 friends) pages, as well as a Twitter feed (1,451 followers). Coincidentally, the launch of the RUSSH blog follows five days after a release from indie fashion rival, frankie, entitled, "Frankie doesn't freak out in face of new media".

In the press release, magazine retailer Sahil Merchant, from Mag Nation, talks up the title:

“Just think about how many people chat about a frankie article over coffee. The magazine becomes almost a social lubricant, which elevates it beyond a mere collection of words and images.

"The same cannot be said about lots of other magazines, which are simply content in print. These are the ones that don't get the new media environment we are in, and will ultimately disappear”.

The release also quotes frankie's social media chops:

frankie.com.au (37,287 unique visitors/month)
Facebook (17,760 fans)
MySpace (13,962 friends)
Twitter (4,600 followers)

That's on top of, the release notes, the magazine's 29,135 audited readers.