YouTube, the digital platform we’ve come to love for letting us watch just about anything under the sun, has set up a new address for fashion and beauty content. The new style hub by the Google-owned platform is located at YouTube.com/Fashion. The destination for all things fashion and beauty features style content from the biggest names in the industry, “how to” beauty tutorials, industry collaborations, live runway presentations and much more for fashion and beauty lovers.
With figures confirming that fashion and beauty creators on YouTube grew by 224 percent from 2014 to 2018, it’s not a surprise a division dedicated to fashion and beauty content partnerships has been created. Derek Blasberg, YouTube’s Fashion & Beauty Director, has been busy fostering relationships with brands and high-profile people in fashion and beauty to get them on the platform more often, and in an effective way that will help them boost their audiences.
Blasberg, who joined YouTube last summer, is the perfect person to lead the fashion and beauty relationships and collaborate with creators as well as a diverse portfolio of brands. Popular and well-connected, he is always seen mingling with A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid and appearing frequently with them on Instagram. And as a man-about-town, he can always be spotted at major events. While the second biggest search engine after Google already has some amazing blue tick-certified creators, Missouri-born Blasberg is “bridging the world of YouTube creators with the global style and beauty industries,” as he said in a statement. Convincing luxury brands and fashion and beauty leaders like Naomie Campbell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Victoria Beckham and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley why they need to be creators, he is getting them to launch or relaunch their channels on YouTube.
Easy-going and known for his love of puns and sharp wit, New York-based Blasberg, who reports to Kelly Merryman, YouTube’s Vice President of content partnerships, has had an impressive career as a magazine journalist, author and TV host. He is a former host of CNN Style and has contributed to publications like The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair, where he was assigned the title of ‘Our Man on the Street’ in 2015.
The move by YouTube, which has nearly two billion unique visitors per month, follows Instagram’s launch of its long-form video app, IGTV. With IGTV, brands and influencers have a new means for vertically aligned videos that can be up to one hour in length.
