The Gates Don’t Hold
IMG decided fashion bloggers had become a liability. This was around 2013. Catherine Bennett, their senior VP, told the Wall Street Journal that Fashion Week had turned into a zoo—it used to be for established designers showing collections to serious media and buyers, now it was street photographers and Instagram people and fans packed into the Lincoln Center. Next year they’d go back to being exclusive. Real connections to fashion only. Everyone else: out.
The timing was almost funny. By the time they were trying to seal the gates, social media had already shattered them. A person with a good eye and a following mattered more to brands than someone who went to every show. But admitting that meant admitting the old hierarchies didn’t work anymore, and the fashion industry isn’t good at that. So they doubled down on keeping people out instead—the move of an institution that can feel its power slipping.
They offered the excluded bloggers a consolation prize: livestream access, social media channels, photos and videos. You can see everything, just not be there. Not be part of the story. Just the audience.
The thing that stuck with me wasn’t the exclusion itself—that’s fashion industry standard procedure—but the panic underneath. They were nervous about who decided what mattered now. They were fighting a battle that was already lost, trying to make gatekeeping mean something when the gates had functionally opened everywhere else.
Obviously it didn’t hold. A few years later, the influential bloggers got let back in because you can’t ignore reach. The whole thing just shifted into this weird hybrid where Fashion Week became less about exclusivity and more about managing every possible platform. The gatekeeping failed quietly, which is how most of it does.