The book, written by the ESDi professor and the ESDiColor_Lab professor, focuses on the Spanish blogosphere and the communicational elements that define it. Even if they’re being progressively substituted by other platforms such as Instagram or YouTube, fashion blogs have managed to constitute themselves as a defining part of the local fashion industry thanks to their personal dynamic with the readers and to their link with clothing brands. Aware of the impact of this phenomenon, Dr. Encarna Ruiz, ESDi professor and ESDiColor_Lab director, made these digital spaces the center of her doctoral thesis in Journalism, “Fashion blogs: from journalism to marketing”, now published under the same title by Editorial Académica Española. “In this thesis I mixed my personal concerns with my work at ESDi, where I’m involved in sociology and communication courses, as well as in fashion trends, due to my work at ESDiColor_Lab. In a certain moment, I realized that sociology could allow me to interpret how fashion was reaching a collective that was beginning to purchase, in this day and age of hyperconsumption, that which was prescribed by certain websites”, says Ruiz. Beginning in 2010 and extending until 2013, her study was conceived during what Ruiz calls the “explosion moment” of fashion blogs, which Ruiz analyzed from her discourse and semiotic analysis tools. “An interesting phenomenon began to occur in Spain around that time: the egoblogs, in which any person can start a blog with his or her own photographs, without having any fashion, writing or photography formation”, Ruiz points out, a discourse that, nonetheless, was utilized by the industry in order to attract consumers and promote online sales.One of Ruiz’s greatest inputs, in this sense, was the classification of different fashion blog categories, in which the egoblogs come into contrast with communication blogs, which are part of company newsletters, and author blogs, by individuals who are specialized in fashion, but have personalized opinions, and were later incorporated to some media such as Vogue and Elle, which stopped viewing them as competitors. “In the moment in which I did my thesis, big data was one of the great unknowns of the industry. Nowadays, it’s one of its most important manifestations, Ruiz adds, considering the expansive possibilities of her work. “There has been a great evolution from blogs to quicker, more instant pages, with more viral capacities than blogs, and greater impact in their connection to brands. If I currently had to widen my study, I would focus on Instagram”, Ruiz concludes.
