New York Times chairman makes a WISH

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Well it’s been a New York Times kinda fortnight. First the NYT’s style supremo blog The Moment published a photo a day throughout RAFW, snapped by frockwriter buddy Sonny Vandevelde. Then on Monday, The Moment ran a slideshow of Vandevelde's RAFW shots (together with our mini event wrap). Now comes word that no less than The New York Times Company chairman and publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, may have his antennae tuned to downunder buzz.

In the annual meeting of stockholders on April 23, Sulzberger waxed lyrical about the company’s achievements in these so terribly trying times.

Sulzberger spent quite some time discussing the activities of the company's digital division.

Sulzberger told shareholders that in spite of the difficult economy, digital revenues continued to rise in 2008, accounting for 12percent of total revenues – up 2percent on 2007 – and that in March (2009, one assumes) The Times Company boasted “the 13th largest presence on the Web, with 52 million unique visitors in the United States”. Sulzberger did not cite any sources for the latter claim.

Sulzberger then added:

“Throughout 2008 and the first months of 2009, we have continued to create a new form of Web journalism that is both informative and compelling. Our goal is to respond to our audiences’ demand for interactivity, community and multimedia, as well as news and information on an increasingly wide range of topics....

“One good example of our learning and adapting occurred in February at the Milan Fashion Show. The New York Times’s T Magazine reported a particularly important change in designers at a fashion line. However, it did not do so in print. Indeed, it didn’t initially appear in our Style Magazine’s blog, The Moment. Instead, the news alert was posted to The Moment’s Twitter account, informing 100,000 followers in a single tweet”.

If the last paragraph sounds awfully familiar to regular readers of this blog and indeed, of The Australian’s WISH magazine, then that could be because the paragraph bears a striking resemblance to the lead of this journalist’s recent social media and fashion story in WISH.

The WISH story opened with an analysis of the recent social media activities of The Moment, specifically on Twitter (here is the slightly longer original version of the story, as published on this blog).

The information was the fruit of original research and had not previously been correlated into any other story.

The WISH story started:

“TALK of the town has Alessandra Facchinetti (ex Valentino) already working on Tom Ford's nascent women's line. So reported The New York Times' T Magazine from Milan Fashion Week on February 28, floating the juiciest rumour of the autumn-winter show season. The news was not, however, broken by the print edition, nor even by the style magazine's blog, The Moment. Instead, a BlackBerry alert posted to The Moment's Twitter account informed 100,000 followers in a single "tweet".

Frockwriter has it on good authority that the NYT PR director was apprised of the WISH story upon publication, who then included a precis in the following day’s executive summary.

Funny how sometimes it takes an outside perspective to find out just what your own staff are up to.

Blurring the lines: Twitter and the RAFW social media experiment

To say the Spring/Summer 2009/2010 edition of Rosemount Australian Fashion Week whizzed past in a blur, is an understatement. Beyond two beatups which did the rounds of several Australian media outlets – the model pay story and the GFC-led downsizing of what turned out to be an exceptionally busy event, with no downtime – arguably the biggest controversy of the week has surrounded the event’s social media coverage. Given that I find myself at the epicentre of this controversy, I thought I’d just post a few observations from the eye of the Twitter storm. And a warning here: buckle up, this time it's a little more than 140 characters.

First, some background.

I am a Sydney-based freelance journalist and I have covered Australian Fashion Week since the event launched in May 1996.

Having commenced filing to the New York-based Womens Wear Daily/Fairchild News Service in, coincidentally, the same year, I have covered the event for WWD in one form or another since that time. This has included event wrap stories in the daily newspaper and a plethora of other WWD news stories and WWD supplements throughout the year.

Over the past 14 years, in tandem with the WWD coverage, I have also covered the event in a freelance capacity for various Australian news outlets, from Channel 7’s Today Tonight to 7 news, as well as print outlets, notably The Australian, The Sun Herald and The Sydney Morning Herald.

As, moreover, the erstwhile fashion reporter for the SMH print edition, the SMH’s online arm smh.com.au and later News Limited’s Australian online news portal NEWS.com.au, I also blogged the event for the latter two online media outlets for three consecutive years from 2006 through 2008.

The first smh.com.au fashion blog in 2006, launched to cover the Spring/Summer 2006/2007 shows, was one of the first dedicated fashion blogs reporting from within Australian Fashion Week, if not the first. It was also among the very first fashion blogs attached to a mainstream newspaper anywhere in the world. The landscape changed very quickly over the following six months. After that initial blog, I then went on to blog three consecutive, four-city Ready-to-Wear runway seasons, from New York to London, Milan and Paris, for initially smh.com.au and then NEWS.com.au.

I launched my own independent blog in July 2008 and this year was the first time that I blogged Australian Fashion Week independently. I did cover September’s New Zealand Fashion Week (which slipped my mind when talking to Kiwi blogger Hannah McArdle last week).

As explained to McArdle, having blogged at Fashion Weeks for three years, I knew there was one place that I did not want to be this year – and that was stuck in the media centre composing reflective posts while I missed a lot of the action.

Unfortunately, it is either one or the other with these events. If you are working solo, it is just impossible to see absolutely everything that is on schedule and also file normal news stories and features on deadline. You have to make choices. I’ve filed to a daily newspaper from the event. And once again this year, I watched my print peers left in the media centre working on stories for their various outlets while I and others headed off to shows. Sure, you can see the photos afterwards, but it’s not quite the same as being on the spot.

AN RAFW SOCIAL MEDIA PRIMER

Blogging certainly upped the ante at Australian Fashion Week in 2006. As pointed out to McArdle, at the time I was mobile blogging or “moblogging” from my BlackBerry to the SMH – however not filing directly into the blog template. The posts were quickly added, complete with pictures, by smh.com.au staff. You would call those blog posts “as live”.

But Twitter made real-time reporting a reality.

Certainly, various free blog platforms such as Blogger allow mobile blogging via email, however prior to this year, I was not blogging independently directly from the event – and nor, to my knowledge, were many other indie bloggers.

I believe NEWS.com.au may have been the first Australian media outlet to use Twitter at Australian Fashion Week – back in April/May 2007. It may well have been the first media outlet to adopt the microblogging service at any major fashion week.

Twitter was introduced under new NEWS.com.au editor David Higgins who, in April 2007, had just been poached from the same position at smh.com.au. It was Higgins who in fact got me blogging for Fairfax at the previous year’s event.

In April 2007 I was three months away from being called over to join Higgins at NEWS.com.au. That month, I covered Australian Fashion Week for smh.com.au. I was at the time unfamiliar with Twitter and recall thinking how daft the Tweets of the NEWS.com.au fashion reporter, Lisa Bjorksten, looked on their website.

I was signed up for Twitter by NEWS.com.au upon joining the outlet, in July 2007. But it was very early days and few in fashion, myself included, could get their heads around the true value of the then one year-old microblogging service via which people communicate in 140-character alerts.

This time last year I began using Twitter on a semi-regular basis.

At the beginning of this year, I started to use it daily and realised what a truly remarkable invention it is – one that facilitates a kind of global water cooler conversation into which absolutely anyone can tap, unlike the cliquey, semi-private service Facebook.

Over the past 12 months – and notably, over the past four – Twitter has exploded, experiencing quadruple digit growth.

As noted on this blog during the FW0910 collections in February and March this year, FW0910 was the first season that Twitter truly impacted on the fashion world, with most major fashion outlets establishing Twitter feeds. Several among them, for example The New York Times’ The Moment and Womens Wear Daily, attracted thousands of new followers over the course of the following weeks.

The difference in the Twitter coverage between the FW0910 season and what we have just experienced in Sydney is that those reporters Tweeting from the New York, London, Milan and Paris shows, were largely communicating via text.

As components of much larger media outlets, other parties added photographs, slideshows and notably, analysis. Of all the reporters Tweeting for The New York Times for instance, the paper’s chief fashion critic, Cathy Horyn, was not among them. Horyn penned her daily news stories and updated her blog, usually no more than once a day. Another chief NYT fashion scribe, Guy Trebay, in fact dismissed the Twitter phenomenon in one of his stories.

By the time the FW0910 Milan leg came around, two weeks after the initial Twitterburst at New York Fashion Week, some professional reporters were also uploading photographs onto TwitPic direct from the runway, Australia’s Marie Claire among them.

With Australian media outlets and industry players piling onto Twitter in the intervening months, we saw quite some TwitPic coverage of the inaugural Swim Fashion Week in February. It passed largely unnoticed by the wider media community.

On the eve of RAFW, it seemed that every Australian fashion media outlet had established a Twitter feed, with numerous fashion publicists and even some designers and retailers also joining up. In the case of Vogue Australia, this was a matter of mere days beforehand – after several parties had established fake “fan” Vogue Australia feeds.

In my opinion, the price paid by Vogue Australia for its tardiness in jumping on the Twitter train is that it had negligible brand presence on Twitter at RAFW.

Appointed as recently as mid 2008, Vogue Australia’s very first online editor, Damien Woolnough was, I understand, also responsible for the Twitter coverage. Woolnough would have been up to his ears writing show reviews and producing multimedia galleries. So were Marie Claire and Oyster, whose brands were unmissable on Twitter last week. Both outlets thought to dedicate at least one reporter to Twitter.

Last week witnessed a veritable avalanche of Twitter coverage.

Yes, FW0910 was a test run, but such was the impact of social media at RAFW, IMG reports that the company’s head office in New York has requested an immediate debrief in order to better understand social media. Julia Knolle and Jessica Weiß from German website Les Mads also report that they have been approached by IMG to collaborate on some form of social media initiative. IMG FASHION's next major event is Berlin Fashion Week.

MY RAFW GAME PLAN

Anyone signed up to Twitter, who was armed with a phone capable of taking, and emailing, photos, uploaded images from the runway last week. Some chose text-only Tweets. I used a combination of both.

I went into the event with a clear strategy: to report as I went in real-time or as close to as I could get. Yes, it was an experiment and I do apologise for not clarifying this in the event leadup.

I assumed that the new format would be self-explanatory and now appreciate that although I had already blogged at the event for three consecutive years, and moved on this season to something newer and faster, many readers are still coming to grips with the blog phenonemon.

“I checked your blog and I can’t find any reviews, just pictures and a few words” noted one international friend who has an iPhone because he thinks it’s chic - but still cannot fathom how to use the (very simple) email function. The end result is that we have to spend a fortune communicating in absurdly overpriced international SMS costs.

Quite obviously this blog adopted a different format last week: a temporary rolling news format.

I attempted to address the fact that not everyone uses, or even understands, Twitter, by integrating most of the Twitter coverage into the blog, in emailing photographs simultaneously to two locations: Blogger (ie this blog platform) and TwitPic, a web application that is integrated with Twitter.

TwitPic is a personal photo gallery, which anyone can view, irrespective of whether or not they use Twitter. I have now included a permanent link to it at the top of this page.

Some of the coverage was exclusive to Twitter.

To provide easy access to all the reportage – and commentary - for those who don’t follow Twitter, I opened up a Twitter widget on the right-hand side of this page, showing the most recent 20 “Tweets”. I agree that it looked messy. However without the resources for a more sophisticated purpose-built website, it seemed the only way to integrate the coverage. Many bloggers have their Twitter feeds permanently integrated into their blogs' home pages. I figured it wasn’t that difficult to follow.

I also downloaded a live streaming video application called Qik onto my BlackBerry. Qik is free software, one of in fact several live streaming video applications that are currently on the market. Over the past few months, Qik has been enjoying quite some publicity via Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. It surprised me that nobody else thought to use it at the event.

In spite of the fact that Qik advertises an integration with various social media platforms, including Blogger, not all seem to function properly and I only managed to integrate a Twitter alert every time I recorded a video, so that you could click that to view the video:

“New live video cross from #RAFW”

I had to manually embed the videos after they were recorded, whenever I had time back at the media centre.

All up last week I recorded 37 videos, 20 of them 3-4-minute interviews with designers and other industry players such as The Sartorialist’s Scott Schuman, Fashion Design Studio director Nicholas Huxley, Fashion Wire Daily's Godfrey Deeny and e-tailer Sarah Pavillard. So far the videos have been viewed almost 3000 times, with at least three of the videos to my knowledge embedded into other blogs. I would have done many, many more videos however realised on Day One that I would have needed two spare BlackBerry batteries to get through every day, such was the degree to which video chewed up the (very slow-to-charge) BB battery.

I posted 140 photographs, many of them with key details attached in the form of garment descriptions, trend alerts and information about models (eg “the unstoppable Rachel Rutt – just starred in her second runway vid in as many says for Gary Bigeni”).

I have not counted how many Tweets I posted, but it was many, many more than that, with 30-40 posts (ie blog/TwitPic posts or text-only Tweets) going up every day. These included show preambles, show commentary, post-show thumbs-downs and industry gossip. One year at the event, while still at The Sun Herald, I penned gossip snippets to accompany the SMH's main fashion story each day (the latter written by Jackie Lunn). These Twitter snippets are no different to what I would have provided the SMH or indeed any other newspaper.

The one thing I did not do was develop longer material for the blog on an ongoing basis throughout the week. I did it once with the news story about Chic Management threatening to pull star Australian model Myf Shepherd from the Kate Sylvester show 40 minutes from start time, after Chic discovered that Shepherd was not opening the show.

I broke the story on Twitter, then developed it on the blog – and in the process of securing right-of-reply etc from Chic and Sylvester, missed the Aurelio Costarella presentation. Unfortunately this was unavoidable - and precisely the type of scenario I had hoped to avoid. But I really did need to get a response from Chic and flesh the story out to be fair to both sides.

I make no claim whatsoever to be a professional photographer.

But that said, in effect I approached last week as a journalist, a photojournalist and a videographer. The last time I checked, television journalists were also journalists. I had a fulltime job as a researcher, producer and occasional reporter at Network Seven from 1996-1999 and have worked with other networks (including CNN). I saw the Qik videos as an extension of this work and also the multimedia work done in the interim with smh.com.au and NEWS.com.au.

To my knowledge I made one mistake – doubling up with the captions from the Diet Coke Little Black Dress show, mislabelling an Alice McCall dress as Kate Sylvester’s. It was quickly corrected. I thoroughly vetted the names of all designers and models etc before emailing the images.

All up, the blog’s traffic doubled – and on one day nearly tripled – with several hundred new Twitter followers piling onto my Twitter feed. Blog subscribers also increased.

THE BACKLASH

I must admit I have been somewhat taken aback by the reaction to the social media coverage of RAFW. It really does appear to have polarised opinion.

Some have noted how much they loved the feeling of being at the event. Others have slammed the quality of the photographs and, in my specific case, the lack of longer-form commentary and proper “journalism”.

I worked incredibly hard last week seeing in fact more shows than I would have had I had to file news stories, features, or longer blog posts. I was happy to keep the coverage moving, trying to see every show and clocking every designer – including those in the often much-maligned group shows.

Many of the latter designers walk away from AFW with no publicity at all. In the first Ready To Wear group show, I was delighted to discover Anaessia. I posted three images of the brand, with commentary that in my opinion, it was the show highlight.

On Day One I had nothing but great feedback, with people sending Twitter replies saying how much they loved the coverage and retweeting posts, images and videos.

Day Two got off to a great start with Dion Lee’s impressive debut solo show in the claustrophobic basement of a Kings Cross carpark. Somehow my Twitter pictures and show review comments managed to get through the concrete bunker but sadly, Qik video transmission died after a few seconds into the post-show interview I did with Lee.

Back at the OPT venue, just prior to the start of Zimmermann, I flicked Qik back on as the power went out and I captured live video footage of Simon Lock standing on the runway addressing the troops in mid blackout. Lock is standing in darkness, his face occasionally illuminated by camera flashes and it’s a fairly amusing video – especially when he asks attendees not to take the goodie bags.

Moments later I was backstage, recording an interview with Nicky Zimmermann, talking about the mayhem. Her professional guard dropped in the midst of the pandemonium, Zimmermann was flanked by her son, with her young daughter on her hip, and she was remarkably candid and relaxed.

Shortly thereafter, I became aware of a Twitter backlash that had been initiated by The Sydney Morning Herald’s gossip columnist Andrew Hornery – with all of it, ironically, unfolding on Twitter.

Unimpressed by the barrage of blurry photos and drawing specific reference to Twitter images tagged as “first looks” (something I was certainly trying to do at each show), Hornery announced that he was going to start 'unfollowing' people.

Sun Herald columnist, media commentator and blogger Mia Freedman chimed in that she was also fed up with the low Twitter standards.


Paul Hayes, a News Limited editor - and blogger - later countered on Twitter:

“print journos issuing instructions on How To Do Twitter Right. Hilarious! #rafw #CrankyOldMedia”

The following evening, when I went to take my seat alongside Hornery at the Jayson Brunsdon show and joked – lightheartedly - about the Twitter backlash, he snarled, “I can’t tell what’s in your pictures”, adding, words to the effect, that I should not be publishing them.

The following day a series of anonymous comments were left on this blog (an Australian designer has since owned up to the first one). The comments echoed very similar sentiments.

Given how swiftly the coverage was moving, they were quickly lost to view. But here they are again:

“patty the twitter thing sucks !! id rather wait to read some reviews and see sonnys photos than your average black berry images with no show reviews , Drop the twit please x”

Followed by:

“If anything, this week has demonstrated the failure of new media. For the past few months, debates have raged over the place of bloggers and twitter-ers in the (fashion) media landscape. I, like many, have supported the new generation of information outlets.

Sadly, this blog, like the majority, have sacrificed journalism for mini tweets and grainy images. The mainstream media outlets are uploading photos within the hour, so we can look at high resolution versions on these websites. Frockwriter is one, if not the only, source of high quality, critical fashion journalism in Australia, and this week we've barely seen more than a 'tweet' and said blurry phone photos. Perhaps its time we moved back to newspapers and magazines, for they have written content with strong visual imagery. The new media landscape has proved it can't integrate both, despite the pace of upload”.

On Saturday, the RAFW special edition of Hornery's Private Sydney column was published.

Given that I have been a financial member of the Australian Journalist’s Association (now the MEAA) for 24 years, that I earn a living selling news to mainstream media outlets and that moreover, RAFW is a trade, as opposed to a public, event, I was amused to find myself - along with the event's other bloggers - being described in the story as a “citizen critic” and “self-anointed fashion arbiter” who had to “scramble” for front row seats. The inference was that the latter were scraps vacated by the more august members of the media pack.

In fact, with few exceptions, all the front row seats I had last week were allocated to me by the various designers.

But the tone of this story should not come as any surprise, given the overall experience of many new media reps that I described in a story about social media in the April edition of The Australian’s WISH magazine.

And perhaps the seeds for Hornery's discontent had already been sown back when the WISH story was first published.

I recall its publication prompted a series of Tweets (perhaps since deleted - I was unable to locate) in which Hornery lamented the poor, "titillating", quality of new media when stacked up against the institution of print news and his concerns that if advertising revenue continues to drift towards social media, who will pay for journalism in the future?

His complaint, echoed by several other commenters over the past few days, is that I failed to write enough about RAFW last week.

At the end of each day, I was thoroughly exhausted and just did not have the energy to go home and compose a 1000-word daily verdict of the day’s events. In hindsight, I could have generated more exclusive blog content, perhaps at least three more solid posts each day and will definitely take this on board for the next event.

As for the blurry runway images, what can I say? Yes many of them are extremely blurry. And frankly, who cares? At least we were all happy to have a crack at it. It wasn’t compulsory to look at the photos and it certainly did not cost anything to view them.

The ‘new media douchebag’ contingent at RAFW joked that perhaps we should christen this new photographic genre of Twitter art as “Bluralism” – and possibly even stage an exhibition. This contingent included Matt 'Imelda' Jordan, Helen Lee, Isaac Hindin Miller, Sonny Vandevelde, Marian Simms, Melanie Hick, Alyx Gorman, Jade Warne and McArdle.

While I concur that some of my runway images last week were very ordinary, on Day Two, I started to get the hang of it and twigged that it was possible to take a vaguely-interesting shot which, although largely an Impressionistic blur, could nail a key clear detail about the garment in question. I felt like I was back in life drawing class, attempting to capture the essence of a model's pose in a few, fleeting pencil strokes. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest if noone else likes them but I’m quite fond of some of the shots which eventuated. They were, of course, captured by complete fluke.






By the same token, there is an element of beatup to the photo kvetching.

The negative buzz overshadows the fact that at least some of the shots produced by all parties at the event were in fact crystal clear. Under the right conditions, it is remarkable how much clarity even an amateur can achieve with a mobile phone camera. Here are a couple of examples from my TwitPic gallery:




I almost did not cover last week’s event – at least not on the ground.

I have a series of now quite urgent deadlines for paid work and taking the entire week off to cover the event meant those deadlines were pushed back. It was a luxury in other words, not a necessity and in the current economic climate, with freelance work becoming harder and harder to find, it was possibly not the wisest decision.

This week I will file on RAFW to both WWD and The New York Times but did I really need to be at RAFW every day from 9.00am until 9.00pm, in order to complete that coverage? The answer is no. I covered the event on the ground for this blog. And for many it seems, that just wasn’t good enough. I'm sorry about that but I gave it my best shot.

Andrew Hornery asks who is going to pay for journalism as the world navigates through unchartered media waters, with a flotilla of lighter, nimbler, high-tech sloops scrambling around the waterlines of the dead tree galleons.

But surely what he really means is, who is going to continue to pay him and his salaried colleagues to produce journalism?

Because while Hornery expects to receive a fat salary and full benefits for his journalistic contributions, he has absolutely no qualms in demanding that an independent blogger such as myself pump out considered, high quality analysis of an event that they have already exhaustively covered, in detail, from the bottom up, via a constellation of vignettes - for absolutely no payment whatsoever.

And he's not alone.

On the record: Fashion Wire Daily's Godfrey Deeny

The Walkley Magazine

Akira, May 2nd, 2008/Sonny Vandevelde

My AFW story in the current issue of The Walkley Magazine, which is published bi-monthly by The Walkley Foundation (and its trustee the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance) and looks at media issues.


This is the second year in a row the magazine has asked me to write an AFW wrap for its June/July issue. The story is not online this time, so I thought I'd blog it.

And look, it's great that they even consider fashion reportage to be on the legit media radar - as so few in mainstream news and current affairs actually do. It's a double page spread, with backstage pics by Sonny Vandevelde and a couple of other shots by the SMH's Edwina Pickles and Steven Siewert.



"CATWALK CONFIDENTIAL"

Many newspaper editors, truth be told, are only interested in fashion coverage for its potential page 3 pics. But ironically the biggest story of Australian Fashion Week kicked off with an image of a scantily-clad model being shoved up the back of the book in the fashion pages.

Had the editors known what they were sitting on it would have run on page one.

Models, medals, missed scoops – and new media players edging in on the establishment – were the hallmarks of Fashion Week’s 13th annual spring/summer 0809 showcase which wrapped at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal on May 2nd.

By week’s end, some had dubbed it the “best ever” in terms of quality, size, pace and buzz. Once the media analysts’ tallies come in, the same term may well apply to the scope of its coverage.

The saucy shot in question showed Polish model Monika ‘JAC’ Jagaciak reclining under a Vichy Shower, the top of her white swimsuit moistened by water jets.

The shot was provided as an exclusive to the early-to-bed fashion pages of The Sunday Telegraph by the local arm of the world’s biggest model agency, New York-based IMG Models.

IMG reps Jagaciak - and its parent company owns Australian Fashion Week. Jagaciak was due to be the star face of a contingent of up-and-coming IMG models, who were being flown out to help up the event’s international ante.

On April 5th on my Fully Chic blog on NEWS.com.au, I had reported the names, ages and nationalities of 14 of IMG’s international models, including Jagaciak.

According to the 1994 birth year published on the website of her Polish ‘mother agency’ Gaga, she was either 14 - or still 13.

Given that Gemma Ward was 15 for her AFW debut in 2003 and Tallulah Morton, 13 for hers two years later, it didn’t seem like news at the time.

That was until I opened the following morning’s Sunday Tele and spotted precisely which handout image had been supplied by IMG.

Jagaciak’s age, and the image, were both hosed down by IMG on 7th April when I called. So I called Gaga Models that night to ask her exact birthday.

The agency confirmed it to be 15th January 1994.

On 8th April, I posted the image, together with the headline, “This Polish teenager was 13 when this image was taken? Do you have a problem with it?”. Apparently plenty did. The blog exploded overnight.

By Friday 11th April, Vogue Australia had cancelled a planned cover shoot with Jagaciak. And The Daily Telegraph, by then outraged by JAC’s age - even though its Sunday edition had reported she would be “leading the beauty brigade” at AFW, with “’face to watch’ written all over her” – was by this stage asking “Should Monika Jagaciak be at Australian Fashion Week?”.

By midday Friday, IMG had banned all under 16s from the event.

But minors were not AFW’s only model story – or its only overlooked photop.

On 28th April, on the morning of the comeback show of expat Australian Michelle Jank, The Sydney Morning Herald published a small Jank story on page three - together with a cropped shot showing only the designer.

In the background of the original image, as it appeared on smh.com.au, stood Australian model Stephanie Carta, just back from a “breakthrough” runway season in Paris – with twig-thin arms.

Carta wasn’t the story on Monday, but she sure was by Wednesday, once The Daily Telegraph got wind that Carta’s Sydney agency Chic Management had pulled her from Jank’s 8.00pm Monday night show due to concerns about her weight only to reinstate her for camilla & marc’s show at 9.00am the following morning.

With the story on most news bulletins that day, Chic Management found itself at the epicenter of the very media circus it had tried to avoid. But the exposure didn’t seem to bother Carta, who turned up on the last day of shows in a custom-made Ksubi T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I’M RAKING IT IN”.

April 30th was a big day for front page fashion news.

The SMH might have missed the skinny model story, but it didn’t miss the war medals in Kate Sylvester’s “Royally Screwed” show.

Running the Kiwi designer’s styling choice by war vets – who were suitably outraged – the story made page one of the SMH for two days in a row, generating much additional radio and television coverage, with the New Zealand media in meltdown mode by end of the first day.

And the clothes?

Perhaps it’s just as well under-16s weren’t welcome because a record number of breasts were on display this season, as antipodian designers perpetuated the international trend for sheer organza blouses, pyjama pants, dresses and skirts.

Other major trends included florals, the ever-present dress, the blazer, the waistcoat, Techno tribal, lace, the dropped-crotch dhoti pant, wide-legged trousers, leggings, Victorian romance, with some brilliant bursts of colour counterpointed against a dark, Gothic undercurrent.

The event delivered some solid newcomers in the form of designers Ben Pollitt (Freidrich Gray), Karla Spetic and India’s Vineet Bahl.

Also newsworthy was the return of several well-known names absent for anywhere from one to five years, as they concentrate on their northern hemisphere businesses: Michelle Jank, Easton Pearson, Akira Isogawa and sass & bide jeans queens Heidi Middleton and Sarah-Jane Clarke.

Bubbling away at Fashion Week for the past two years, blogging reached something of a minor critical mass this year, with at least 10 bloggers covering the event – half of them international delegates. A fact which was not lost on traditional media, which duly reported their visibility.

In his colourful outfits, which included a brushed cotton playsuit, teamed with a different luxury handbag each day, flamboyant Filipino blogger Bryanboy became the star of this ‘new media’ old media story.

“Planet Earth’s Favourite Third World Fag”, as he calls himself, this international fashion week virgin, who has zero professional reportage experience but a global fanbase, flew straight from the Third World and into the front row this season (and on his own dime, contrary to several reports).

This fact would no doubt grate on the nerves of some of the event’s previous international media delegates from such august publications as The Financial Times of London and high-profile Nylon magazine - who, in a previous season, boycotted some shows in protest of having been accorded merely “general admission” tickets.

Evidently they didn’t have Bryanboy’s Technorati ranking.