With the rise of Twitter, bloggers are slowly disappearing. And yet fashion blogs are 'hotter' than ever. In the fashion industry right now they have as much influence as magazines. Last week, at the Amsterdam International Fashion Week, bloggers were in the front row.

One of the most popular is Mexican-born Andy Torres, who lives in Amsterdam. Some 300,000 people visit her blog stylescrapbook.com every month.

26-year old Torres grew up in Guadelajara, a place where - she says -  she could not cross the street in fashionable hats or 12 centimetre heels without getting criticised. Determined to make it in the fashion industry, she started travelling the world. After a period of wandering she landed in Amsterdam, where she hoped to find work as a stylist.

But it proved difficult for a young Mexican to break into the closed world of Dutch fashion.

At the end of 2007 she was one of the first to begin her own fashion blog. Initially she wrote about the latest trends and made photo collages. But her blog really got going when she put photographs of herself on it. 

"One day I was going to a party and I took a photo of my outfit and I put it on the blog. I really didn’t think about it, I just put it on the blog. And I got many more comments than I got on the other posts. In the four years that I have been blogging, it moved towards the direction of becoming outfitpost.  I try to translate the trends from the fashion shows in Paris, Milan and London with brands my readers can actually afford. And that’s the reason why it became so big. My readers don’t have the budget to buy Chanel, so for them it’s very interesting to see how I recreate that look with affordable brands like Zara and H&M."

Amsterdam Fashion Week
At this year's Amsterdam International Fashion Week, fashion bloggers played a prominent part. They sat alongside the catwalk blogging live about the latest trends. In contrast to the fashion magazines whose write-ups appear weeks after a show. The director of the Amsterdam Fashion Week, Bert Maussen, talks of a current trend that cannot be stopped.

"If you see the kind of impact a blogger can have, it's immense. In many cases it's overtaking newspapers and magazines. We regard it as important to welcome and assist fashion bloggers in Amsterdam, since it benefits not only the International Fashion Week, but also the designers. The more fashion bloggers we have in the front row here in Amsterdam  the more publicity brands and designers get."

Style discoveries on-line
Andy Torres' fashion blog has become a full-time job. Thanks to her blog, she receives - almost daily -invitations to fashion shows and events and travels all over the world. And she puts her latest fashion finds online on a daily basis. When she came to Amsterdam four years ago, she was a lost girl with a dream. Now she's an international style icon. Every now and then, Andy Torres can hardly believe it herself. 

"It is really surreal, sometimes I am at home and just sit and think about it. I was in Los Angeles, three weeks ago, acting in a series, it was the first time I was acting, and four days later I was off to Spain to shoot photos for the autumn-winter campaign for Mango, it was the first time I was actually modeling for a well-known brand like Mango. So I was sitting on my couch, thinking: is this really happening to me or is this all a dream? It’s sometimes overwhelming." 

(js/imm)