Apparel Search on the Fashion Indie Blog — January 15, 2007

On January 15, 2007, the Apparel Search Company was posted about on the Fashion Indie blog, in a post titled “An Indie Fashion Fillet with a Side of Fashion Salad.” The post appeared during a busy week for the directory in the fashion blog world: a post on the FashionTribes.com blog is dated the same day, and The Fashion Rag followed in July 2007 — a run of independent-blog coverage that shows how fashion websites were discovered and discussed in that period.

About Fashion Indie

Fashion Indie offered the best in emerging fashion sales and events for the New York fashionista, and provided the fashion forward with insight on new fashion trends. That brief put it on the discovery side of the industry: not the established department stores and designer flagships, which had their own publicity machinery, but the emerging labels, sample sales and events that a reader could only find by following someone who watched for them.

A blog with that mission was a natural place for Apparel Search to appear. The directory's own purpose was also discovery — helping readers find companies, resources and information across the whole fashion industry — so a Fashion Indie post introduced the directory to exactly the readers most likely to use it: independent-minded New York fashion followers looking for what was new.

The Post, and Why It Can No Longer Be Viewed

The post's address was fashionindie.com/events/2007/01/15/an-indie-fashion-fillet-with-a-side-of-fashion-salad/ — filed, fittingly, under the site's events coverage for January 15, 2007. The playful title is very much of its moment: mid-2000s fashion blogs wrote in a chatty, pun-loving voice quite unlike trade-press formality, and posts were as much personality as information.

That address can no longer be opened: the Fashion Indie website itself is gone, and with it the post. This is the recurring fragility of blog-era coverage — when a small independent site closes, its archive usually closes with it, and the only surviving trace of a post is the record kept by the sites it mentioned. This page is that record for the Fashion Indie post: the date it appeared, the title it carried, and what the blog was.

Independent Fashion Blogs in 2007

In January 2007, fashion blogging was still young and distinctly independent. Blogs were run by individuals and small teams, published on their own schedules, and read by loyal audiences who arrived through links from other blogs. A mention traveled: one blog's post became another blog's reading, and a directory could be introduced to thousands of new readers without a single advertisement.

The coverage collected in this section shows that ecology at work. Within six months of 2007, Apparel Search was posted about by Fashion Indie and FashionTribes in January, covered by CTFE in March, and discussed on The Fashion Rag in July — four independent voices, each with a different readership, carrying the same directory's name to readers a trade announcement would never have reached.