Jane Aldridge, of Sea of Shoes fame, successfully made the jump from utilizing the blogging platform to communicate fashion information to using social media to further engage her readers and entice new ones — her Instagram profile, in particular, attracted 206,000 followers, while her Sea of Shoes Facebook page attracted almost 38,000 fans.
The Texas native started the fashion blog at the age of 15, telling Fashionista in 2017 she thought it would last for two weeks. The blog, which celebrated vintage fashion, quickly hooked readers and took off, eventually evolving into a business that brought Aldridge collaboration opportunities, private dinners with the late Karl Lagerfeld and an appearance at the prestigious Crillon Ball in Paris, where she was inimitably dressed in a one-of-a-kind Chanel gown.
“When something that crazy happens to you, you don’t know how to take it,” Aldridge told reporter Fashionista’s Tyler McCall about her rise to fashion blogging fame. “It was all so surreal to me, but I was like, ‘I guess I’ll run with this opportunity.’”
Since Aldridge made the blog her career in lieu of attending college, a collaboration with Coach’s executive creative director Reed Krakoff, a forging of close working relationships with the likes of Nicolas Kirkwood and modeling gigs with Barneys New York have all made her and her blog all the more prolific. Teen Vogue’s fashion news director Jane Keltner de Valle told Texas Monthly’s Jason Sheeler in 2012, “Jane was an early pioneer, and now there are a bunch of imitators. She doesn’t follow trends — part of that comes from being in Texas and being isolated.”
Among the content Aldridge regularly posts on social media to engage and attract followers, her shots of modeling vintage clothes and posts containing industry-fueled headlines seem to remain the most popular. Photos of recent buys, old favorites, her work environment, romantic shots of her and her husband and an image of the recently deceased Karl Lagerfeld are some of the most recent images Aldridge posted to her Instagram account, pulling in readers who follow her for the clothes themselves but also informing followers about recent happening in the fashion industry.
“I have no words,” she said in an Instagram post dated Feb. 19 in which she posted an old photo of Lagerfeld. “Karl, what will fashion be without you? Truly the end of an era.”
Perhaps in a fitting tribute to the man who encouraged her on her path to fashion blogger fame, Aldridge, just days later, uploaded an image of herself walking down a paved walkway in a black and white woven Chanel jacket, paired with a black striped crop top, ripped jeans and ivory-and-black Chanel pumps.
“Another favorite look with a black @chanelofficial jacket @chanelofficial pumps given to me when Chanel had their incredible pre-fall 2014 collection here in Dallas,” she wrote on Instagram. “Maybe most special things I own.”
While Aldridge curates an appreciation of vintage fashion in her followers by developing a career out of documenting vintage fashion and the recent work of fashion’s most notable designers, she is by no means the only fashion influencer to publish valuable material about fashion or the fashion industry. BryanBoy, who Aldridge credits as an influential fashion blogger, also forged a career documenting and appreciating fashion from an outsider’s perspective and was instrumental in making fashion accessible to the masses via the blogging platform. The fashion “insiders,” too, hold considerable value in communicating fashion information. Hamish Bowles, with a decades-long career in fashion and a long tenure as International Editor-at-Large for Vogue, brings a great sense of history to his work, posting content on social media about anything from old Hollywood costume design to the work of couturier Charles James to fashion events staged by the some of the fashion industry’s most influential personalities. Suzy Menkes, too, is a prolific fashion journalist who brings great perspective and context to her fashion reporting. Despite there being numerous designers, models, photographers, journalists, brand managers and other fashion influencers to follow to know everything about fashion, a mix of fashion journalists and bloggers is often a good place to start to develop perspective of and knowledge about fashion, much like Aldridge has in her work developing content for Sea of Shoes.
Bibliography
- McCall, Tyler. “A Decade in Digital: Jane Aldridge is Grateful Sea of Shoes Has Never Changed.” Fashionista. Sept. 4, 2017. https://fashionista.com/2017/09/jane-aldridge-sea-of-shoes-interview. Accessed Feb. 23, 2019.
- Sheeler, Jason. “The World At Her Feet.” Texas Monthly. April 2012. https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-world-at-her-feet/. Accessed Feb. 23, 2019.
- Aldridge, Jane. Untitled. Instagram. Feb. 19. 2019. Accessed Feb. 23, 2019.
- Aldridge, Jane. Untitled. Instagram. Feb. 20, 2019. Accessed Feb. 23, 2019.
Madeline Shannon 