Meet Vogue Roadman, Vogue Critic for a New Era

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Is style getting worse? Who’s Rei Kawakubo? What’s style week?

Vogue journalist Odunayo (Ayo) Ojo has amassed over 90,000 subscribers and three million views on his YouTube channel, Vogue Roadman, by answering these questions and plenty of others, explaining the ins and outs of the trade to newcomers and providing evaluation to insiders. Final yr, he trialled a print journal, the Vogue Archive, printing 350 copies at £50 a bit. They offered out the primary day, Ojo says, taking him abruptly.

Ojo, 24, is a captivating fashion-specific instance of what occurs once you mix core journalistic values — enthusiasm, analysis, rigour, and a yen for storytelling — with a expertise for Gen Z viewers engagement and an impartial sensibility. Nonetheless a scholar, Ojo will start his third yr of style journalism examine at Central Saint Martins subsequent month. However, he’s already begun carving a distinct segment in style media. “There are methods to create your personal viewers and construct your personal success,” he says. “And I believe even the concept of what style journalism is, is altering.”

The partitions have come down round style criticism. Gen Z style fanatics are utilizing social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok to weigh in on information, collections, histories and tendencies, chatting with the keen ears of their friends who could in any other case be intimidated by the trade’s extra conventional media panorama. It’s made individuals like Ojo sudden authorities on the subsequent technology of style discourse, all from his bed room, the place he movies his movies. The rise of criticism on social media, the place everybody’s an professional, is a double-edged sword, however Ojo’s method has garnered reward from the themes he discusses.

One confirmed Ojo fan is Samuel Ross, the founder and designer of A-Chilly-Wall. In 2019, Ojo posted an evaluation of A-Chilly-Wall’s Spring/Summer season 2020 assortment. Not lengthy after Ojo occurred to identify Ross in Selfridges, the place the 2 recognised each other. Equally when he approached designer Thebe Magugu by electronic mail for a CSM mission, the LVMH prize winner responded to Ojo saying he too had been watching Roadman content material.

Over an electronic mail, Ross says of Ojo: “His voice is crucial, and demanding. It cuts by way of the noise, bias and fluff, providing a parity and critique — two lacking, or hardly ever discovered values throughout Gen Z and millennial design tradition. Ayo is goal, not subjective in his ideas and experience.”