Fashion favourite Derek Blasberg on how he's bringing his magic touch to YouTube

Ask Derek Blasberg who throws the best party of fashion month — the four-week carnival of elaborate, expensive shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris that is currently in full swing — and he does not miss a beat. “I do.”

His eye-roll is implied: quite obviously, few command a guestlist like Blasberg. To offer a swift summary to the uninitiated — those over 35, social media refuseniks — Blasberg is a 37-year old fashion journalist with a very large black book, 912k followers on Instagram, and a CV whose gigs include Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and a period as Vanity Fair’s “Man on the Street” (he is still a contributing editor). He collaborated with Karl Lagerfeld and consulted for Louis Vuitton and Fendi.

He is also, seemingly, the most popular man on Planet Fashion. Pore over Blasberg’s Instagram account and you’ll see him holding hands with Serena Williams, posing with Kate Moss and Julianne Moore, or capturing a mirror selfie with Victoria Beckham. And that’s just this week — Gwyneth Paltrow used to consult Blasberg when writing her Instagram captions, and he and Orlando Bloom recently dressed up as matching “flirty cowboys”. Karlie Kloss is a close friend. He calls people like Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner by their first names.

In other words, that claim about throwing fashion’s best do is probably credible. The night before we meet for a swift lunch at The Connaught (he orders crispy salmon sushi and a kale salad), Blasberg organised a party attended by Jenner, the Hadid sisters, Joan Smalls and Alexa Chung at the Standard, the new livewire King’s Cross hotel. Tequila flowed.

Still, this party was technically work not play, one he was hosting in his capacity as YouTube’s first head of fashion and beauty partnerships, which means he presides over a section of the site (a vertical, to use the terminology) named YouTube.com/fashion — or “slash fashion” as Blasberg is calling it. The channel features livestreamed fashion shows, beauty lessons, YouTubers doing fashion tutorials, and VIPs (big ticket acquisitions include Chung, Naomi Campbell and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who all have their own channels).

Blasberg has been in his role since last June and works in Google’s NYC office in Chelsea Market. He is spending this fashion month co-ordinating the livestreaming of 33 shows across four cities (including Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors and Dior), brainstorming ideas for new channels and persuading some of his VIP friends to launch their own. On Chung’s, she shares game videos of herself learning to date like the French do, or making a “jetlag smoothie”. “Her channel’s doing super well,” Blasberg purrs. “What’s great about her and her YouTube channel and why she’s so much fun to hang out with is she’s quick-witted and built for [being on] a camera.”

“Slash fashion” has 935k followers and counting. In his short tenure, Blasberg has coordinated the first livestreaming of Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty lingerie show, and managed to get the ancient house of Dior to acknowledge YouTubers as VIPs. Still, when you think YouTube, you do not — yet, at least — think of fashion. Music videos, cat videos, roughly shot slow-mos of people falling over, yes. Fashion — and all the gloss and glamour that conjures — not so much.

Blasberg gives this idea short shrift. “A lot of people assume typical YouTube users are young gamers. There are a lot more than just gaming fans on this platform.” He also bristles at a comparison between YouTube and Instagram — the latter of which has democratised the industry by taking it off the pages of small circulation glossy mags and into the hands of anyone with an iPhone and a passing interest. “I mean, YouTube is twice as big as Instagram.”

Still, he agrees, in a roundabout way, that busting open this elitism is what drew him to the role at YouTube. “When I was 18 years old, I didn’t even know what fashion was. I lived in St Louis, Missouri. We had magazines, we had newspapers, but there was no place I could really indulge in my fascination for art, photography, dressing up. What I think is great about YouTube is there’s now a place for 18-year-olds in Missouri who are interested in ‘What is Valentino?’ ‘What’s it like to be on Alexander Wang’s catwalk?’”

He also functions as a modernising influence. “I think the fashion industry as a whole has been at times a little slow to adapt to social media, to adopt these new advances in technology,” he says. “Fashion is very hierarchical. People don’t like change around here.”

Blasberg’s allure to YouTube is, presumably, a combination of his experience, digital fluency and his contacts. The journalist could probably sweet-talk a long list his VVVIP friends to create a channel and start broadcasting — who’s his dream star signing? “There’s a zillion people I’d like to see creating more content on YouTube,” he says, loyally, before relenting. “Gigi had a YouTube channel when she was in high school, called ‘Ask Gigi’. It’s still somewhere in the bowels of YouTube. So I’d like to get her back in there.” He adds that Hailey Bieber and Bella Hadid would also “do very well because they’re already famous and digitally relevant. Kendall could read the phone book tomorrow and people would watch it.” But he’d also like to see people who are not “famous social media supermodels”. “There are people in fashion who I think have incredible stories, or a firm grasp of the hallowed history of fashion, who I’d like to see on YouTube”.

Fashion loves a fairytale, though Blasberg’s journey from small town to front row was a more a workaday story of hard graft. He moved to New York at 18 to study dramatic literature and journalism at NYU, and “discovered this whole world of stylists, make-up artists, fashion shoots, runway shows. So I did what I think a lot of kids still do — I interned at magazines, I wrote press releases, I wrote model biographies for an agency. I was seduced and hypnotised by this glamorous world and I’ve been around ever since.” This seduction included a stint working at Models 1 at the age of 19, living near Soho, “which is like a kid in a candy store when you’re 19”. His acquaintances in London included Vogue editor Edward Enninful, then a model. He still says the “Brit lot” are his favourite clique at fashion shows. “You guys are always up for a good time.” We drink more than Americans, perhaps? “That helps.”