Meet Style Roadman, Style Critic for a New Era

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

Style journalist Odunayo (Ayo) Ojo has amassed over 90,000 subscribers and three million views on his YouTube channel, Style Roadman, by answering these questions and lots of others, explaining the ins and outs of the trade to newcomers and providing evaluation to insiders. Final 12 months, he trialled a print journal, the Style Archive, printing 350 copies at £50 a bit. They bought out the primary day, Ojo says, taking him unexpectedly.

Ojo, 24, is an interesting fashion-specific instance of what occurs if you mix core journalistic values — enthusiasm, analysis, rigour, and a yen for storytelling — with a expertise for Gen Z viewers engagement and an unbiased sensibility. Nonetheless a scholar, Ojo will begin his third 12 months of trend journalism examine at Central Saint Martins subsequent month. However, he’s already begun carving a distinct segment in trend media. “There are methods to create your personal viewers and construct your personal success,” he says. “And I feel even the concept of what trend journalism is, is altering.”

The partitions have come down round trend criticism. Gen Z trend lovers are utilizing social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok to weigh in on information, collections, histories and tendencies, talking to 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 folks like Ojo sudden authorities on the following technology of trend discourse, all from his bed room, the place he movies his movies. The rise of criticism on social media, the place everybody’s an skilled, 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 time 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 significant. It cuts via 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.”