The Ones Who Didn’t Make the List

Rankings are something I love with an almost embarrassing intensity. They’re always wrong in illuminating ways, they make the included insufferable and the excluded furious, and watching people who are quite convinced of their own importance lose their minds over a methodology they’d never have questioned if it had validated them—that’s one of the more reliable pleasures this industry provides.

I say this as someone who has spent years not appearing in these things. You do the math eventually. You accept that the criteria are whatever serves the researcher’s thesis. You tell yourself the ranking is meaningless. You believe yourself slightly less each time. Then you go back and read the methodology section one more time, just to confirm that yes, it’s meaningless, while secretly hoping for a footnote that at least acknowledges your existence.

The GfK—Germany’s primary consumer research institute—published an analysis of the country’s most influential fashion bloggers, which is the kind of document that reads like a peace treaty between media and commerce. Names like Anna Frost, Daaruum, and xKarenina appear prominently. Several people who are quite convinced of their own influence do not appear anywhere in the document. This has been noted.

The real entertainment comes next: the counter-rankings, the carefully worded subtweets, the suddenly urgent public interest in what "influence" actually means and why follower count is an inadequate metric. The next Fashion Week will be interesting. It always is when someone’s ego has recently been audited by an outside party.