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Every millennial with a career on the internet has lived through at least three platform deaths. The blog gave way to Twitter, Twitter to Instagram, Instagram to whatever the algorithm decided last quarter. Call it the platform trap: you build an audience on rented land, and the landlord changes the rules whenever it wants. Patreon's creator survey found 70% of creators feel cheated by the big platforms, and 75% believe the algorithm punishes them for not posting constantly. The newsroom version is not gentler: Challenger, Gray & Christmas counts 1,727 news industry job cuts through August. Fashion Bomb Daily turned 20 this month, which makes it older than Instagram, and its founder has a theory about why it is still here.
Claire Sulmers started the site in 2006, when fashion media was print and a website was a novelty. She borrows a metaphor from the singer Brandy, who performed at her sixth annual Bomb Fashion Show during New York Fashion Week: “In fashion, there’s a classic and there’s a trend, and I think after 20 years, you are a classic.”
The distinction is the whole strategy. A trend optimizes for the platform of the moment. A classic optimizes for something the platform cannot take away. For Sulmers that has been two things: the reader and the relationships. “We don’t say this is hot. We say here’s something. What do you think?” The audience votes, and it has been voting since before engagement was a metric.
The relationships run just as deep. She interviewed LaQuan Smith as a street-style subject outside Bryant Park before he was a designer. She has known Sergio Hudson 15 years. “You can’t buy those relationships,” she said.
From the beginning, the site credited the stylists, photographers and makeup artists behind a celebrity look, at a time when most outlets named the star and moved on. That habit built a network of people who owed her nothing and helped her anyway.
None of that means she stood still. When Instagram started pulling readers off the blog, she inverted the business. “At first Instagram was the side dish to the entree, which was our blog,” she said. “We went from having content on the blog first to having all of our content on Instagram first, and then only our top-performing posts were on our website.” The brand now has 2.2 million Instagram followers, a YouTube channel near 100,000 subscribers, a growing TikTok presence and interviews that have crossed a million views.
The other adaptation is borrowing reach rather than begging for it. Using Instagram’s collaboration tool, Fashion Bomb Daily co-posts with the leading paparazzo in Lagos and another in Paris. Smaller accounts get her audience; she gets original footage from cities she is not in. It is the same move as crediting a stylist, run through a product feature.
Independent operators are the growth story in media now. Pew found 21% of U.S. adults regularly get news from influencers on social media, 38% of adults under 30, and 77% of those influencers have never worked for a news organization.
Sulmers is candid that for a long time she was the only one in the digital space carving out room for Black and Brown people in fashion, and equally candid that Vogue has never featured her outside a 2014 ad. Her site ran Law Roach’s work with Zendaya first and gave Cardi B her first fashion editorial while she was still on reality TV.
Three moves translate to any field. Credit the people behind your work publicly and specifically, because the goodwill compounds into a network no algorithm controls. Let your audience talk back and design for their answer, not your taste. Treat every channel as a side dish and be ready to swap the entree when the readers move.
She is doing it again: a podcast, scripted and unscripted television projects, a network of young correspondents in other cities, and a Los Angeles edition of the Bomb Fashion Show. “You cannot stay stagnant,” she said.
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