Three is a magic number (maybe)

leoni milano

Happy Independence Day to my American readers. July 4 is also frockwriter’s birthday and today we turn three. How time flies. It seems like only yesterday that I was saying sayonara to mainstream media blogging (for smh.com.au and news.com.au) and venturing into the wild blue yonder of the indie blogosphere. What a ride it has been. And what can I say but, once again, thank you for your interest, your comments, your Tweets, your links, your trackbacks, your feedback and your shit-canning. Over exuberance of the latter at one point over the past year prompted me to finally upgrade my comments system. Couple of milestones. It took two years to reach one million page views. But just one to reach two million. What might it take to hit one million PIs per month? Certainly much more of an effort than currently goes into this blog, due to paid work commitments and other distractions (such as a family drama, which has occupied a huge amount of time over the past few months). But I’m working on it. Thanks to new advertising partner Pages Digital, the first ad campaigns have gone up. Early days of course. But baby steps. 

Thanks to Kent for his unwavering support. Thanks also to my mates. You know who you are.
 

Special thanks to the inimitable Andrej Pejic, the subject of frockwriter’s two most popular posts of the last twelve months (not to mention an in-depth current affairs profile on Seven Network’s Sunday Night program). The year’s other top posts included Pretty Babies, about the eight year-old stars of an editorial in the December edition of Vogue Paris - a post that attracted the attention of the US Christian Right and broke frockwriter’s comments record. Coincidentally, it also precipitated, by several days, the announcement of the departure of Vogue Paris editor Carine Roitfeld. Bulgari’s Lolcats and Givenchy’s Gender Bender (about transsexual model Lea T) were other popular posts.
 

Thanks to all the photographers, designers, editors, PRs and model agents for their generosity with tips, info, access and notably first looks at images, covers and campaigns - and of course the models themselves, who occupy such a huge part of this blog.
 

Thank-you also to the other bloggers, journalists and media outlets which regularly pick up frockwriter's stories. So very much appreciated.

Dress circle: Leona Edmiston celebrates a decade of frocks

Congratulations to Leona Edmiston and Jeremy Ducker on the 10th anniversary of their fashion label. The occasion was celebrated yesterday at a small lunch in the Boathouse restaurant, which is located directly above Sydney University’s Women’s Rowing Club boatshed on Glebe's Blackwattle Bay. It was also an opportunity to unveil Edmiston’s Spring/Summer 2011/2012 collection, 12 very pretty dresses from which were modelled by Tania Pozzebom, Caris Tiivel and Tiah Eckhardt [L to R, above]. Australia’s answer to Diane von Furstenberg, Edmiston’s hero product is the dress. In fact, that's all she makes. “By focussing on the one thing, we’ve been able to remain independent and grow at our own pace” Edmiston told her lunch guests. 

The business is the third and most successful incarnation of Edmiston’s fashion career, after she co-founded the influential Morrissey Edmiston label with Peter Morrissey in 1983 and then went solo with her own eponymous line in 1998. 

After an acrimonious split with her former business and life partner Peter Hutchison in 1999, the latter business would prove shortlived.

Third time lucky, however, for Edmiston. In 2001, together with new husband and business partner Ducker, she launched what has since blossomed into a highly successful business that boasts 26 boutiques, including six Myer concessions and standalone stores in Los Angeles, London and Shanghai.

Five new boutiques are due to open this year, with yet more brand extensions soon to be added to an already impressive arsenal of Leona Edmiston licenses, from jewellery to fragrance, shoes, handbags, hosiery, eyewear and childrenswear. 

Here's to the next ten years.

Click (here) to see frockwriter's Posterous backstage pic gallery.

 

Ellie Ross and Ryan Cooper cover the 5th anniversary edition of WISH

 
WISH, the monthly, glossy luxury mag published by The Australian newspaper, turns five next month. To celebrate, David Meagher - the magazine's editor for three of those five years - has picked up the hot multiple cover trend seen in several international titles (including V), and commissioned five elegant covers for the edition, to be printed randomly. The issue launches on October 1st and here is an exclusive preview of all five covers. Shot by Australia’s Next Top Model judge Jez Smith and styled by Ken Thompson, they star New York-based Australian Ellie Ross and Kiwi Ryan Cooper, who flew to Sydney specifically for the job. In each image, they are wearing an exclusive look created by one of five luxury brands especially for the issue: Burberry, Giorgio Armani, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co and Ralph Lauren. 

all images: supplied exclusively to frockwriter by WISH

Frockwriter turns two (and maybe, one day, pro)

rachel kara

Yesterday was American Independence Day, which means it was also frockwriter’s birthday – our second birthday. Just a quick word to say thanks, once again, for your interest, feedback, comments, links, slagoffs... Whatever your connection to this blog, thanks for noticing it. It's enormously appreciated, really. Because it's not like you don't have enough distractions out there competing for your attention. This time last year I mentioned that visitors had reached 200,000 and page impressions, 400,000. In twelve months, those figures have tripled, with frockwriter hitting the one millionth page impression mark on May 14. And this is in spite of the fact that half of the year, October through April, was almost spent on hiatus, while I was preoccupied with a freelance work stint which required a fulltime commitment. Much bigger blogs, of course, easily do one million page impressions a month. But at least it’s a gauge that this blog has managed to establish an audience. And that's motivating. If there wasn’t any interest, I wouldn't keep blogging.

Just on content, since I don’t (yet) have the functionality to show you which posts generate the most interest, I thought I would compile a snapshot of the most popular posts from the past two years.

Number one, by a long shot, is the last post I did on American teenage fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. Quite ironically, the post was a year old when Gevinson hit the mainstream press at New York Fashion Week last September. It was the last of a series of posts I had done on her in 2008, but must have had a very high search engine rank under Gevinson's name. Once the world's media started writing about her, that's where a lot of people seemed to look for more information, helping generate record traffic that month (close to 100,000 page impressions).

That post proved almost twice as popular as the next most popular post: Abbey Lee Kershaw’s revelation, in December last year, that she, Natasha Poly and Sasha Pivovarova refused to walk in Alexander McQueen’s 'Armadillo' shoes for the Spring/Summer 2010 show in Paris. That story went around the world.

Here is the rest of frockwriter’s top ten most popular posts since launch, in order.

- Where's Abbey Lee? Full frontal and dogging for Terry
- Tiah Eckhardt to bare it all (again) for French Playboy?
- Carry on Pirelli: Kerr, Kershaw and McNeil rubber up for Terry Richardson
- Randy Johnston was not the only model who died last Saturday
- Where's Abbey Lee? Apparently in need of some TLC
- Out of Vogue: Nipple jewellery
- In Vogue: McBeha
- Tallulah Morton - apparently still partying with the Cobrasnake

Yes, four posts in the top ten focus on nudity and that's probably hardly surprising given the nature of the net. There is however a huge gap between the PIs of those posts and the two top posts mentioned above, which have got nothing to do with nudity. If I wanted higher traffic, I would deliberately aim to include more nudity. But that is not the reason it's there. Nudity is a part of the fashion business and it’s up for discussion and debate.

Just in terms of the past 12 months, I wanted to run through some of my favourite posts.

- The neverending adventures of Cassi van den Dungen, since she was crowned runnerup of Australia’s Next Top Model Cycle 5. There was the Facebook fracas with Alex Perry and Charlotte Dawson - in which even Dawson stopped by to comment. In February, van den Dungen found herself in yet another Facebook flap over comments made during a work trip to Paris. That story also whipped around.

- After twelve months of speculation – fuelled by numerous posts on this blog – Jenna Sauers finally outed herself as Tatiana, the anonymous model blogger of US womens superblog Jezebel.

- A bunch of Australian-born, New York-based fashion media heavyweights got together in the Big Apple to launch the Australians in New York Fashion Foundation and mentor young Australians. To mark the occasion, frockwriter picked the brains of a half dozen of them and ran a mini series of profiles.

- In September, Mark Fast hired some plus size models for his Spring/Summer 2010 runway show and his stylist quit. Broken on Twitter, then developed by frockwriter, the story travelled widely.

- Last week's Andrej Pejic series also seemed to generate quite some interest.

Lots of blogs and media outlets have picked stories up. I would just like to single out for special thanks a couple of the larger outlets that do so on a regular basis: various posters on The Fashion Spot (with a special shoutout to Bianca), Fashionologie, The Cut, Models.com, Pedestrian, The Sunday Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Thanks are of course due to my partner Kent, who has been incredibly supportive over the past two years as I invested time and energy into establishing the blog.

I liaise with many different bloggers, journos and new media peeps both on- and off-line. Perhaps it’s no surprise that after blogging for four years, some of my best mates are now bloggers. Special thanks to Bryan, Sonny, Matt, Sam and Isaac.

Thanks again to all of frockwriter’s readers, who now include over 1000 RSS subscribers. I really do appreciate your interest and hope to continue bringing you more of whatever it is that keeps you coming back each day in a crowded media marketplace.

Feel free to either comment or drop me a line re suggestions for material you would like to see more of, or something that I haven’t covered at all.