Magazines and blogs

Today we will talk about fashion magazines (represented by the notorious L'Officiel) and blogs. About the new and the old. About history and modernity. And that in any business, the main thing is still professionalism, the desire to learn and love for what you do.

And so, L'Officiel ("officially about fashion"), a bit of history.

L'Officiel is a French magazine. Fashion magazine.
French fashion magazine - this already says a lot. L'Officiel is a magazine with history, its history began back in 1921. 90 years of history. An impressive term. And how many articles were published during this period, photos were posted ...

By the numbers of the French L'Officiel one can easily trace the history of fashion, and the history of the twentieth century as a whole. Probably, the filing of L'Officiel numbers since 1921 may well become a kind of encyclopedia of fashion. After all, it was L'Officiel magazine that first introduced its readers to such couturiers as Jacques Fath or Christian Dior. And it was L'Officiel who was the first fashion magazine in the world to publish color photographs on its pages, and this happened in 1938.

Today L'Officiel is published not only in France, there is a L'Officiel in Japan, Brazil, Greece. L'Officiel is also published in Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia.

L'Officiel has been published in Russia since 1997. The well-known Evelina Khromchenko was its editor-in-chief for a long time. Evelina has appeared on television more than once, for example, in the show "Fashionable Sentence".

The existence of L'Officiel in Russia ended in a scandal. In 2010, instead of Evelina, the wife of the publisher of the Russian version of L'Officiel, former model and fashion editor of L'Officiel, Maria Nevskaya, was appointed editor-in-chief of L'Officiel-Russia, which caused complaints from the French side. As a result, the license for publishing L'Officiel in Russia was transferred to the publishing house AST, and the post of editor-in-chief remained with Evelina Khromchenko, which in turn caused claims from Parlan Publishing CJSC, which had previously published L'Officiel in Russia, and litigation began.

Ukrainian version of the magazine
There is also a L'Officiel in Ukraine, and, according to the French side, this is one of the best options for L'Officiel outside of France. In the Ukrainian version of L'Officiel, about 90% of the materials are devoted to local topics, and only 10% - to what is relevant in France. L'Officiel-Ukraine is published in Russian, published since 2001. Anna (Ana) Varava has been the chief editor of L'Officiel-Ukraine since 2004.

Ana Varava received a linguistic (English) and psychological education (image-maker-psychologist). She attended courses at such renowned design schools as the Marangoni Institute and St. Martin's College of Fashion in London, Fashion Institute of Technology (New York).

Ana Varava is a very active person, she is one of those few people who like what they do, really like it. Such people live by their work. Ana notes that even at the institute she liked to write, and she does not consider her current work as a work from nine to six, in fact, she lives by work, and it is not possible in another way. And, probably, that is why she notes that it is not realistic to combine a career and a family, because it is unlikely that "any normal husband can withstand such a schedule."

And here we finally come to the topic of blogs.

As editor of a fashion magazine, a magazine with a story, Ana Warawa is highly critical of fashion bloggers. Well, fashion bloggers are also quite critical of the good old fashion magazines. But, with Ana Varava, with her criticism of fashion bloggers, one can quite agree. And I will try to convey to you how I understand it.

First, most fashion bloggers create their own style by displaying pictures of their bows.And if a person has an impeccable taste - this is good, if the taste is not very good, if there is not enough knowledge and understanding of what fashion is, then it is one thing if the audience of such a blogger is not large, and if it so happened that there are many readers, then why then this man, this blogger, offers his reader lessons in bad taste? And then, it's silly to say that you are holding a Louis Vuitton bag, if you have a cheap fake in your hands, which you simply cannot distinguish from the original, there is not enough knowledge. Nevertheless, in order to do something and speak with authority about something, you need to be a professional in this area, you need to have certain knowledge and skills.

Secondly, street fashion - street fashion bloggers cannot advertise expensive brands. Street fashion bloggers very often take pictures of people on the streets, they are not ordinary images, but people on the street are often dressed completely different from Dior. But, on the other hand, such blogs, without pretending to be high fashion, may well earn on advertising clothes from democratic brands, those brands in which people on the street can be dressed.

And, thirdly, it all depends on what audience the designers themselves are counting on, yet people who can afford expensive clothes are most often conservative and trust old, trusted sources of information, namely, the very old good fashion magazines.

So it is not always worth trusting fashion bloggers, and, I will add from myself, especially ours, post-Soviet ones, because our knowledge in the field of fashion is often not even enough for the designers themselves, our education in the field of art in general, not only design, is still far away from the ideal. And then I thought, do we have it at all - education in the field of art? I'm talking about universal education, education for the entire population. We as a whole, as a society, are able to distinguish first-class from secondary, beautiful from ugly, high-quality from cheap kitsch, taste from bad taste? There is something to think about ... right?