As it does year after year, New York Fashion Week greeted the city with a flurry of energy, opportunity, glamour and innovation. Faces of fashion from around the world flock to this frenzy of abundant inspiration, waiting impatiently to taste the fruits of hard work and raw, uninhibited artistic prowess from designers, models and marketers alike. However, a large number of New Yorkers experience the phenomenon solely through gazing dreamily at their phones and laptops. They scroll through their Instagram feeds and the #NYFW hashtag, sighing with admiration at the countless runway videos and post-show snapshots that flood in by the minute.

Many view the world of full-time Instagram fashion bloggers as a plague upon the creative names of fashion, claiming that bloggers do not produce anything of value in the fashion community. However, it is renowned Instagram fashionistas such as Chriselle Lim and Caro Daur whose consistent updates throughout the day tell their more than their respective 700k followers which NYFW shows they’re going to, what brands they’re wearing and even where they’re staying.

Instagram bloggers and celebrities represent an emerging and extremely profitable new digital frontier of the fashion industry, which has always been known to gravitate towards the unconventional, bizarre and innovative. It is an industry grounded in embracing the modern, and regardless of whether or not one believes that these bloggers provide a valuable contribution to the world of fashion, it’s safe to say the variable of social media is here to stay.
 

Today's look for @toryburch // standing in front of my hotel @editionhotels – already feels like home here ????#newyorkedition | jumpsuit – http://liketk.it/2pb2m via @avenue32

A photo posted by Caroline Daur (@carodaur) on Sep 13, 2016 at 8:59am PDT

Before the birth of social media, fashion enthusiasts would turn to magazine articles and reviews in search of looks and inspiration. These publications are written by talented writers who have battled their way to an audience through years of succinct, artful analysis and dedication to their field. But now, searching for inspiration can be as easy as opening an app on your phone and clicking on a blogger’s profile.

While bloggers such as Chriselle can deliver unconventional and innovative ensembles to the public eye, there are plenty of other equally successful Instagram bloggers who deliver bland, unoriginal looks and content. These less creative bloggers lean into basic, crowd-pleasing, one-style-fits-all looks that make you want to roll your eyes and yawn into your phone. Some Instagram fashionistas also provide summaries of products on their blogs that are vague and inarticulate, showing little to no real depth of knowledge about the technical artistic aspects of fashion aside from a penchant for identifying and replicating soothing color palettes and clean-cut silhouettes.

Yet one cannot stake any general claim against fashion bloggers that discredits the work of the entire blogosphere. After all, these people are not meant to be journalists, nor are they trying to be. Instagram bloggers are not Vogue staff writers. They are not here to give substantial coverage or real, potentially controversial opinions on the events of fashion week but to provide something much less intimidating and much more accessible to the masses.

Julia Hengel, who boasts 960k followers on her Instagram says on her website that she started her blog “Gal Meets Glam” as “as a platform to be creative,” and that the escalation of her business and influence was unexpected. Similarly, Chiara Ferragni, founder of “The Blonde Salad” and one of the first major fashion bloggers to skyrocket to success on Instagram, notes in a Business of Fashion article “When I started back then, I just wanted a personal space.” Her account now has 6.6 million followers.

The allure of Instagram fashion bloggers to everyday consumers is that many of them came from humble beginnings with little to no experience in the world of fashion whatsoever. Just as any celebrity written about in the gossip section of magazines, “They’re just like you!” The platform on which Instagram celebrities thrive allows them to do so mainly because it is widely accessible. Seeing these people communicate their glamorous lives to you from the same social media platform that you regularly communicate through establishes their personas as ‘real people’ with whom consumers can relate to or have a personal connection with.

Women’s Wear Daily noted that bloggers with well-established followings could be paid anywhere within a range of $5,000 to $25,000 for a single endorsement post. The same article stated that Kylie Jenner could be paid anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000, and noted that successful Instagram bloggers could make anywhere between $1-3 million a year simply through endorsing products on their accounts.

Although some Instagram celebrities like Chiara Ferragini rarely tag their posts as sponsored material, she has recently launched a limited-edition macaron box and custom macaron with Ladurée. While it is initially difficult to draw a connection between fashion and fine pastries, the deal is a flawless example of how internet celebrities engineer the presence of a brand.

But when companies such as Digital Brand Architects, who represent well-known blogger Aimee Song micromanage a blogger’s account and establish the blogger’s work as a brand of its own, does the practice and position of an amateur blogger expressing his or her own genuine sense of style retain its original artistic integrity? 

Email Katie Borkov at [email protected].