The Big Shift

Driving past what used to be the Borders store at Santana Row, there are now signs for Lévare Living on an empty building with blacked out windows. Every time I pass the building on my way to Peet’s Coffee in the morning, I feel a twinge of sadness.  I have been a bookworm all my life and grew up huddled over a novel in the obscure isles of Borders and Barnes & Noble. In a matter of weeks, local Borders everywhere put up “everything must go” signs and then eventually closed their doors forever.  It has, of course, to do with the introduction of devices such the Amazon Kindle and the nook, the shift to downloading music instead of having to buy it in stores, and online services such as googlebooks, etc.  This shift can be seen all across the board.  In the academic setting, more and more textbooks are being offered online.  People now prefer to digest their daily news online rather than on paper.  Personally, I still prefer print over a screen and find myself printing out reading material that is on the computer rather than reading it on the screen.  There is something about the feel of paper, being able to flip a page, folding an edge to mark your spot, doodling and highlighting, that can never be replaced.  Still, the big shift has taken place. 

Always forward in the times, fashion has of course kept up with this new shift.  I have always been an avid consumer of fashion magazines.  Recently though, I started noticing that my issues of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar haven’t been what they used to be.  Not only are they thinner, the fashion spreads and editorials are mediocre at best.  It seems to be the end of the era of the glossies.  All the major magazines have moved online, but it seems that their era of dictatorship is all but over.  This began with the emergence of the fashion blog.  The fashion blog is shifting the way people shop and develop their style because they are eliminating the middle mad (i.e. Vogue, skinny models).  Fashion now goes straight from the street to you.  For example, streetpeeper.com is a blog dedicated to taking snapshots of stylish people on the streets of cool cities such as New York, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, and London.  In an incredible turn of events and a demonstration of how mass collaboration is erasing the boundaries between the companies and consumers, fashion houses are now seeing what is happening organically on the street and then adapting it-it’s all about being on the cutting edge.  The entire movement is based on being an “early adopter.”  This whole shift is really a demonstration of how technology is changing our world in terms of culture.

All that said, seeing the latest collections of beautiful clothes on the glossy pages of a fashion magazine can never be replaced.