Fashion and the media

An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique and commentary can be found in magazines, on television, fashion websites and in fashion blogs.At the beginning of the twentieth century, fashion magazines began to include photographs and became even more influential than in the past. In cities throughout the world these magazines were greatly sought-after and had a profound effect on public taste. Talented illustrators drew exquisite fashion plates for the publications which covered the most recent developments in fashion and beauty. Perhaps the most famous of these magazines was La Gazette du bon ton which was founded in 1912 by Lucien Vogel and regularly published until 1925 (with the exception of the war years).High fashion did not become popular among the general population until it started getting featured on television; few designers were household names, models weren’t famous and fashion shows were not the celebrity driven extravaganzas of today. It began in the 1950s with small fashion how-tos during commercial breaks. In the 1960s and 1970s, fashion segments on various entertainment shows became more frequent, and by the 1980s, dedicated fashion shows like FashionTelevision started to appear.Fashion made its debut on the world wide web in January 1995 with the launch of Fashion Net by Stig Harder in Paris, France. However, the longest running on-line fashion site is Lookonline.com published by Ernest Schmatolla that was officially launched as a BBS first on December 4, 1994. In the mid 1990s, the Internet was still largely a research network populated by academics. But the strong appeal of this entirely new medium was made evident by the pioneering efforts of fashion's early entrants and soon both independent and established fashion publishers, designers and visual artists were online. As Nick Knight - possibly the very first fashion photographer to embrace the Internet - succinctly put it, it showed great potential over "yet another glossy picture in a magazine."