Of the 99 most influential fashion & beauty blogs for the April/May 2011 ranking a full one-third are new to the Style99 from the previous ranking, but it’s worth noting many were included in the previous full index, though they didn’t make the top. In other words, though we say it with each update, there are many blogs not in the top 99 that are still incredibly influential. In the coming days, we’ll cover a few of them, but for now we highlight those blogs building influence at a breakneck pace.

Jennine Jacobs may have had a bit of a distraction earlier this year, but it didn’t stop her from organizing the popular Independent Fashion Bloggers conference, Evolving Influence. From the huge year over year jump, the IFB blog’s influence is evolving quite nicely. Sticking with blogs that cover the business aspects of online fashion, the aptly named the Business of Fashion also had a significant gain in influence year over year.

Other blogs gained influence as a result of consolidating content. Refinery29 benefited from a site redesign that brought all of their content together in one super blog. Previously feature and blog content were separated, but they’re now all in one place. Another big blog that gained due to a rollup of content is AOL’s Stylelist. With Luxist and other lifestyle blogs shuttered and rolled into Stylelist (along with the traffic boost from the Huffington Post), the site is actually the most trafficked fashion blog online. Traffic is only one part of our ranking, but the increase has positively affected the number of sites linking to Stylelist as well as the number of people sharing the site.

While personal style blogs like Style Rookie, Fashion Toast and the Cherry Blossom Girl had smaller gains, they also appeared pretty highly on our last ranking list so the significance of the moves shouldn’t be discounted.

New to the Top 99

When compared to the previous ranking, 35 – more than a full third – of the top 99 influential blogs were newcomers. In some cases it was simply a matter of expanding our index. That’s an area we spent considerable time on, and the starting index now contains more than 1000 blogs (previously, it was more than 500). That includes blogs that previously weren’t included like the hilarious Man Repeller, wonderfully crafty P.S. – I Made This and the full on fashion fanaticism of Vogue editor turned style blogger Anna Dello Russo.

In other cases however, it was simply a matter of dedicated efforts from blogs in our older index. In our 2010 blogs to watch, we suggested keeping an eye on Street Etiquette, the men’s personal style blog from Joshua Kissi and Travis Grumbs. Previously not in the top 99, the dapper gents from the Bronx are now ranked number 53. Swedish personal style blog KenzaS was listed within striking distance on the previous ranking and is now in the next place at 54.

Though they didn’t make the top 99, Nerd Boyfriend and Park & Cube were also two of our picks for blogs to watch  and are now within striking distance of the top 99. We know what can happen from there, so never underestimate the blogs that are slightly under the (top level of) influence.

View the April/May 2011 Style99 for links and detailed ranking information on each blog.

Say what you'd like about Alexa Chung, if you're a fashion blogger she won't be reading it anyway.

Here’s one… different fashion blog trend: turns out a lot of fashion blogger favorites aren’t that into most fashion blogs.

“Blogs are ridiculous; they’re just mood boards – unless you are Tavi [Gevinson, of Style Rookie]”

– Alexa Chung in the June 2011 edition of Vogue UK {via Fashion Foie Gras/Lockerz}

A point of view that it seems the New York Times‘ Cathy Horyn shares.

“Itâ€s a lack of original content. Sooner or later, itâ€s like anything, people change, people look at that and say ‘This is boring.†And some young journalist will come along and distinguish themselves with original reporting. And they will hopefully be fluent in French and very good at reporting whatâ€s going on at the luxury goods companies and the big brands in Europe, because thereâ€s a complete need for that kind of reporting. You can be tough and feisty and a little bit of a guerrilla reporter, for want of a better word, and I think thereâ€s a need for that. I donâ€t think a lot of the blogs are distinguishing themselves by linking and just being snarky or being opinionated. Do some reporting.”

– Cathy Horyn in an interview with ($20 million fashion blog) Refinery29

And even the most influential fashion blogger of them all.

“Iâ€m not really a fan of personal style blogs—you know, the ones [on which] these girls just shoot their outfits and all this stuff. I havenâ€t seen one that I really like or that draws my attention every day. The good and bad of that is that most these girls only have a limited wardrobe; they donâ€t have many clothes to shoot and I donâ€t think most of them have come up with looks that are that interesting, that draw me.”

– Scott Schuman, aka the Sartorialist in an interview with (Style.com fashion blog) StyleFile

Schuman does give some credit to the time capsule that all of the personal style blogs will become in decades to come, but in general let’s remember that “fashion blog” covers a lot of territory these days. As evidenced by the fact that 2 out of 3 of these quotes came from…wait for it… fashion blogs.

To Ms. Horyn’s point, speaking purely from personal experience there are plenty of fashion stories we try to report on, but big brand representatives tend to not reply – not even to give a “no comment” – to people who try to do reporting when they don’t have a major news organization behind them. An example? Sure. For weeks, we reached out to retailers who’d participated in Fashion’s Night Out to try to paint of picture of the real financial impact of Fashion’s Night Out. We love the excitement it generates, but we’re not convinced it’s actually a sales boon for participating retailers. Unfortunately, since no one would comment, we can’t be sure. Another example? You’ve got it. There was an interesting piece in the New York Times (you probably saw it) on the expense that went into producing Marc Jacobs’ most recent show. You know what we were really interested in? What happened to those 1100 yards of vinyl that were brought in for the even after the show. After all, if a company spends that much on props for a show, you’d hope they would find an interesting way to reuse them. Unfortunately, none of our emails or phone calls requesting comment or more information were returned. US or Paris. Not that we’re complaining: there are a lot of emerging fashion companies doing some really interesting things who are happy to reply to us, and more often than not, we learn about them via blogs like the Business of Fashion or FashionablyMarketing.me or by actually getting out to events and doing some reporting.

A new fashion blog comes along every day, so inevitably at some point it becomes difficult to separate the signal from the noise, but let’s not write off an entire category because you tune out for a bit.

Yesterday we were taking a look at tweets when Style Blog Fuck Up popped up on our radar. First on Tumblr, the blogging service that’s put a good deal of effort into nurturing it’s fashion community, it’s since moved to WordPress.com.

It seems that Tumblr has proactively closed the account, and there are some questions of copyright infringement facing the unnamed UK person behind the blog.

In the UK and the US, sometimes usage of a photo – even one marked all rights reserved – is allowed to be reproduced for discussion, criticism or news value. This doesn’t mean news agencies can grab any photo they want and say “news! We can do what we’d like here”, but an article which discusses a controversial image can include that image in the discussion.

For example, Ralph Lauren’s attempts to have images of it’s now infamous Photoshop disaster ad pulled on grounds of copyright infringement fell flat because much of the discussion was surrounding just how terrible the retouching in the photo was (it gave an already slim model alien-like proportions, skinnier than those of a concentration camp starvation victim).

While SBFU has the right to use the images in commentary, Tumblr also has a right not to host the content or the blog. It ultimately goes to the larger question of whether style bloggers can expect to become public figures of some sort, and maintain total control of their images. In the case of derivative illustrations of style bloggers being used on commercial products (sans blogger notification or permission), we noted that while the illustrations were probably legal, it really just rubs people the wrong way to see their image on a product they have nothing to do with. Inditex eventually pulled the shirts.

That said, here’s our take. The discussion of the style blogger outfits and some use of images is probably permitted, but SBFU is just mean for the sake of being mean, banal and totally lacking in terms of any comedic value.

On Tavi: “people are lining up to tounge fuck her arse. I guess being a try hard gets you somewhere.”

On Carrie from Wish Wish Wish: “This girl has probably the most popular style blogs in the UK. Only god knows why. Shes a quintessential upper middle class girl born with a silver spoon in her arse. Add this girl to the “made with paint” category, cross referenced with cunt.”

Then there was the “smile” at an American blogger who has since removed her blog on “Fashion for the Economically Challenged.”

Look, we enjoy a laugh at people who take fashion a bit too seriously as much as anyone. Man Repeller? Hilarious, we await the next roundup of things that look like vaginas. The Fug Girls? Brilliant. Regretsy? Love it. Michael K‘s continued descriptions of Karl Lagerfeld as a fashion zombie (we have to quote this)?

“Lily Allen, Florence Welch, Clemence Poesy,and Emma Roberts. They crawled through the tundra for miles to get a picture with the exquisite demon whose mop of bone dust threads holds the broken dreams of 12-year-old models in its tips.” {Dlisted}

Or his description of John Galliano as “the secret love child of Boris and Natasha Fatale” and Captain Hook? We wish he’d write about fashion more often, because it’s pure comedy.

“You’re a stuck up cunt with money” and “haha, you don’t have money and your attempt at style makes me smile, silly American”? More of a sophomoric personal attack from a small mind that doesn’t contain any of the wit, style or education that makes the aforementioned blogs worth reading. SBFU’s own f*ck up isn’t necessarily critiquing style bloggers (which is more likely to happen the more popular they become), but completely failing at finding a style of its own.

Now, two of fashion’s largest companies find themselves facing questions over what constitutes inspiration and what constitutes copyright violation.

Trending Topics, a blog from Spanish newspaper El Pais, reports (in Spanish) that Spanish retailing giant Inditex has once again used illustrations of fashion bloggers for a line of t-shirts without prior permission from the bloggers.

In May 2010, Betty Autier of Le Blog de Betty noticed a t-shirt in Zara that featured an illustration bearing a striking resemblance to one of her photos. The only problem? Autier was never contacted by the illustrator or Zara about usage of the image.

Michèle Krüsi is a 19-year-old blogger from Switzerland who, like many other bloggers, posts personal style photos to Lookbook.nu. Lookbook.nu serves as inspiration for plenty of personal style fans, including those at some of fashion’s largest brands. Someone from Stradivarius, a Spanish retailer also owned by Zara’s parent company Inditex, took inspiration from this image of Krüsi and created a t-shirt based on it.

Image compilation via El Pais

“If they had asked me there would be no problem, and of course I would have told them they could use the photo if I had been offered one of the shirts or something,” Krüsi says. {Trending Topics/El Pais}

Louise Ebel, who is known to readers as Miss Pandora, also found herself an unwitting subject of Stradivarius’ new line via an illustrated appearance on two different shirts.

Ebel says “I’m really disappointed to find my work, and the photographers with whom I made the photo shoots, on T-shirts, and without having been warned. I think it’s disrespectful and it detracts from our work. I have been used and undervalued.” This actually marks the 3rd time Ebel has been illustrated for a t-shirt by an Inditex brand. The first time was in the same collection with the image of Betty Autier that sparked the debate. {Miss Pandora}

The legal issues here are a bit fuzzy though: while using the photo as is for a commercial purpose would be an obvious violation of the photographer’s rights, do those same rights extend to a derivative work? Those were the issues Fairey and the AP were to argue before settling their case, but with the settlement they still remain. In the US there is a pending fashion copyright bill, but even if it should become law, the issue of what’s protected and what’s fair use in derivative design isn’t totally clear.

As far as any moral questions, the fact is that fashion brands don’t even agree on the basic issues as an industry.

The Hermes Birkin bag is a coveted style status symbol, and fairly recognizable. Independent fashion label Thursday Friday decided to print an illustration of a Birkin bag on a canvas shopping tote. {She Finds via Styleite} Something of a wink and nod to the classic bag that normally retails for thousands of dollars. The Thursday Friday website says:

“We realized we were using the shopping bags as proxy accessories and wanted to take them a step further, to have the bag itself declare what’s going on.  So we ended up with a surreal design that references luxury but ultimately works as an anti-status status symbol.”

Except Hermes found nothing surreal about the design, and is suing the company for “riding on their reputation” and “confusing, misleading, and deceiving the public.” Seemingly placing Hermes on the same side of the table as those who were angered over Zara’s usage of blogger photos for illustration inspiration without notice.

Ganymede Kids posted an interesting analysis of the first Zara situation, which is worth reading regardless of which side of the issue you find yourself on; and this TED talk from Johanna Blakley raises interesting points as well.

When bloggers and decades old brands, who’ve never looked upon imitation with any feelings of flattery, end up on the same side of an issue it’s a sure sign that new media mavens aren’t the outsiders the old guard likes to believe they are. Welcome to the inside.