#NYFW – Fashion Blogger BryanBoy’s Path to Power

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Bryan Grey-Yambao, better known as BryanBoy, is an elite fashion blogger who’s invited to even the most exclusive Fashion Week shows. His eponymous blog averages over 1.4 million page views a month.

He’s been blogging about fashion since 2004, longer than the Sartorialist, or Tavi Gevinson. A lengthy profile in the New York Observer credits him with initiating the breathless, run on, gushy prose now rampant in fashion writing. He also set the standard for the disclosure of designer “gifting” – where designers bestow products, travel, accommodations and even appearance fees on bloggers. He reportedly made $100,000 in 2010.

BryanBoy declined to be interviewed for the article, citing a pending deal with another “media outlet.” But friends say that no one has a better insight in the fashion world.

Originally from the Philippines, BryanBoy is linked with a scandalous blog that briefly emerged there in 2008, Chikatime.  Filled with gossip about the country’s elite and powerful, it rattled the upper classes. The writing style matched BryanBoy’s, though he never admitted to writing it, and Manila’s traditional media distanced itself from him. But by that time, he was influential, 26 and sitting in the front row of Marc Jacobs’ shows–basically the equivalent of Anna Wintour.

Novelist Alex Gilvarry’s  main character in From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is a flamboyant Filipino fashion designer known as Boy. Gilvarry said he learned about fashion by reading BryanBoy. “I think it’s funny that BryanBoy and Manny Pacquiano are like the most famous Filipinos in the world right now,” Gilvarry told the Observer, “and right behind them is Imelda Marcos.”

New York Observer