One Writer Mourns the Death of Fashion Twitter
Erika Bearman, aka OscarPRGirl, in her signature illustration. Photo: @oscarprgirl/Instagram
Last week, two of fashion’s most influential social media stars resigned from the jobs that made them famous. Or at least the jobs that they held when they became famous. Aliza Licht, formerly DKNY PR Girl, and Erika Bearman, formerly Oscar PR Girl (as in Oscar de la Renta), are both moving on. Bearman will consult. Licht will further promote her popular book about mentorship, Leave Your Mark, and pursue projects that rely more heavily on her personal brand than the gravitas of the fashion house below the name on her email signature.
I learned of the news via Twitter, because Twitter is my main source for everything. I rarely check Facebook, I don’t have time to scan homepage urls like I used to, and Instagram is more of a before-and-after-work toy. I wasn’t, to be honest, surprised by either departure. Over the past six months, as the DKNY business got an overhaul, Licht began posting more from her personal account. Bearman, who is expecting her first child, has also been posting more personal photos to Instagram. I can’t remember the last time I read one of her tweets. But regardless of whether or not we saw it coming, saying goodbye to these “PR Girls,” as they named themselves all those years ago, felt like an end of an era in many ways. “Jesus, big week for early twitter phenomenons,” tweeted GQ editor John Jannuzzi, a social-media contemporary of Bearman and Licht’s who was a Twitter star long before he was an editorial star.
Jannuzzi still tweets quite a bit. Which is great, because he’s entertaining. But he’s also one of the last men standing. It feels as though the fashion industry’s early Twitter adopters have abandoned the platform, or at least stepped away from it. Twitter has become less of salon and more of a news ticker. Fewer and fewer people are on there just to hang out.
DKNYPRGirl, Aliza Licht, also in illustration form.
“Back in the day I would wake up and go on Twitter every morning for an hour of posting and chatting with Twitter friends. The way you get up and check your email,” says Mickey Boardman, editorial director at Paper magazine, whose tweets I always enjoy. “I’m now in the habit of going on Instagram and Facebook more. I still go on Twitter everyday, but now I just read more and click on links more than actually posting.”
That’s not to say Mickey has sworn it off altogether. “I actually still love Twitter and have been meaning to get back to it,” he says. “I did live tweet the Republican convention from Paper’s twitter feed and that was super fun. So I do hope to get back up in the tweets.”
But why the shift? Brands are certainly putting less effort into their Twitter accounts as Instagram’s importance as a visual storyteller increases. The only way to really gain traction on Twitter is to have a personality, which can be tricky in terms of messaging. (DKNY wiped its entire account clean when Licht dropped the PR Girl act.) And driving sales is hard on any platform, even when you have a great relationship with your audience.
As for the individual industry personalities whose accounts have gone dark? Maybe there is simply less time to tweet. For many, Instagram and Snapchat are job requisites, too, and so time needs to be allotted to those as well.
However, I do think Fashion Twitter is hurting more than say, Sports Twitter or Tech Twitter or Feminist Twitter. As a frequent tweeter who follows more than 2,300 people, I don’t believe that there are as many interesting Twitter conversations happening around fashion as there are around those topics. Other groups are having more fun bickering and teasing and laughing and yelling and just generally interacting with each other, whether that means NBA players communicating completely—and hilariously—through emoji, or the ongoing dialogue around Donald Trump. Neither topic thrills me, but I’m amused all the same. Just the other night, I spent 30 minutes enthralled with Tinder’s tweetstorm regarding a not entirely favorable article published in the September issue of Vanity Fair. The writer, Nancy Jo Sales, kept retweeting every damn thing said about it, while journalists from all different ilk were spewing their thoughts and opinions around Tinder’s arguably insane remarks. Great fun.
I use Twitter for a lot of things: to promote my own stories and to read other people’s stories, but mostly to witness shitshows. (For someone who often writes more than two articles a day, it’s a great way to blow off steam. And of course, procrastinate.) I do wish, however, that there were more interesting fashion people chiming in these days. Twitter is the opposite of Instagram in that it’s harder to keep your guard up. Maybe that’s why it’s not as appealing to those who are in the business of refining images, including their own.
Related: So Long @OscarPRGirl: Is @Fashion Having a Social #Meltdown?
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