By Tim Lambourne
Blogger and model Gala Gonzalez is only 24 years old but she is already a powerhouse in the fashion blogosphere.
Her site gets between 15,000 and 20,000 hits a day, and prides itself on picking fashion trends.
See the full interview with Gala Gonzalez here
Gonzalez grew up around fashion; her uncle is a respected designer, but despite that lineage her first career choice was the media.
“Everybody was saying, ‘oh you can draw, you're going to be a designer’, and I was like, ‘no, I don't actually want to do that’, so I started journalism in Barcelona but then I realised that you can't really escape what you've learnt and what runs in your blood,” she says.
Now she is a designer, model and blogger; her site, Inside am' lul's closet, is her outlet to show trends that are happening on the street as much as the catwalk.
“Share ideas, helping each other saying, ‘ok, this is going to be hot this season and this is how I'm going to be wearing it’, and some people go there to get inspiration and you go to other peoples' blogs to get inspiration as well,” she says.
Blogs took a while to get credit but magazines are now getting amongst them; when their print copy hits the shelves their content is picked up by bloggers and syndicated all over the world for free.
“The shoots that we do here or that we do overseas have a really international audience now where they might not have had before and it's all because of bloggers picking up on them,” says No magazine creative director Delaney Tabron.
Kiwi brand Stolen Girlfriend's Club also reaped the rewards of a blog shout out; racking up around 50,000 hits after being mentioned on the site Fashion Toast.
“We had this huge spike of people searching our brand name, and it was in April, and we usually get the big spike in September when it is New Zealand Fashion Week and we were like, ‘what happened in April?’ We didn't do anything but then we worked out she had done a post on one our jackets,” says Marc Moore.
But despite the attention, Kiwi designers still face logistical challenges.
“We don't get to know as much as we could and we have to research a lot and trying to get a hold of pieces is almost impossible,” Gonzalez says.
But Gonzalez is hoping to change that; she is in talks with New Zealand Fashion Week to cover the annual event and with tens of thousands of fashion fans hanging off her every word – that can only be a good thing.
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