All hail the birth of the new fashion critic

I love the anarchy of the world wide web. There are no rules. Opinion, information, debate and dissent, all can all be found here. A bit like an elaborately destructive form of democracy.

With a simple click you can have the front row seat at the catwalks of Milan, New York and London. Season after season. You can live stream the Burberry and Chanel shows and see it with the rest of the world. Else, open your social media apps and vicariously live through every self-respecting fashionista's images and opinions on shows even before the last model has exited the ramp.

This unrestricted access gives you the kind of freedom the closed door world of fashion has never experienced before.

Earlier, if you weren't an anointed high priestess you weren't allowed to have an opinion. And once you made your pronouncement it was immediately elevated to a diktat. There was a clearly a leader and a follower. So if orange was the new black, then you burned your LBD at the stake.

Today, that imperiousness has been inverted. Try it and you run the risk of being virtually snubbed. Freedom means many opinions, existing all at the same time. Clamouring for attention. Grabbing eyeballs. From slick websites to cool blogs and street style snapshots… all hail the birth of the new fashion critic! The people are taking back their power.

Nowness

My fast favourites in this category are Refinery 29, Business of Fashion, Into The Gloss, The Cut, Garance Dore and Nowness. They range from being commercially mainstream to focusing on the commercial. From a one-line interview with Karl Lagerfeld to the new trend of not washing your hair, it is all out there. Presented to you, by you, for you. The reader comes first. Because the reader is writing the content.

Closer home, at a recently concluded fashion week, bloggers in India finally had their moment in the sun. They were elevated to the new style gurus of the front row. From celebrity dressing to catwalk coverage, their stamp of approval was the new must have. But the truth is when they were good they were very, very good, when they were bad, they were horrid.

One of the side effects of anarchy is that opinion is not filtered through intelligence. So much reportage is done with obvious prejudice and a desire to shock and provoke. Luckily it is at a micro level. By largely existing virtually as digital natives do, a sense of worth is created by tagging a closed circle. Sometimes of just three egos - starring me, myself and I. Then the trend report consists only of selfies.

Reporting on fashion is like reporting on any other subject. It involves research other than Google. And its only validation is good writing. My personal hero is Suzy Menkes. Style editor of The International Herald Tribune (now The International New York Times) for 26 years, her reputation for being unbiased has translated into her new role as International Vogue editor (read on 19 websites globally). You can see the same rigour and integrity being applied even though the medium has changed.

Watching her I have also learnt the importance of the edit. Now I base my curation on Ms Menkes mantra, taught to her in her earlier days: "It isn't good because you like it; you like it because it's good." So if the coverage isn't worthy, with a simple click on my smart phone, I change the URL. Follow a new timeline. Switch to a different Instagram feed. This is my anarchy. I think it is fashionable to be intelligent.