Female DJs Set Fashion Styles in NYC

The New York Times has a cool and interesting article today about female DJs in New York City who are becoming the trendsetters.

Apparently Agent Ska isn't the only one bringing the 1950s ska/James Bond/Fedora style back:

"Yes, they are shaping their fans’ musical preferences. And to judge by the prevalence of high-waisted trousers, suspenders, cropped leather jackets, porkpie hats and fedoras on the dance floors, they are calling the tune in fashion as well"...




“When you go into a club and the D.J. is wearing something, it almost gives it idol status,” said Frannie Schultz, 21, a college student from Brooklyn. Ms. Schultz, who mingles high style and low in deference to idols like Leigh Lezark of the MisShapes and Roxy Cottontail, noted that on the Lower East Side, epicenter of the downtown club scene, style is “centered around the promoters and the D.J.’s.”

I was surprised that there were enough female DJs to write this article about. I always see male DJ's and I'd been wondering when the tables would be turned (haha! Get it? Tables Turned?!?) My question wasn't too off base.

"A decade ago, only a handful of women, including Ms. Bond and Ms. Nellor, could claim the kind of style clout that comes with a presence in the D.J. booth.

“The barrier was high for females trying to enter an essentially male-dominated field,” said Rob Principe, a founder of Scratch Academy, a school for aspiring D.J.’s with outposts in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. Today, women are less intimidated, Mr. Principe said. In 2002, when the school was established, 10 to 15 percent of applicants were women. Now that figure is closer to 40 percent.

“D.J.-dom has definitely been a boy’s club, a kind of cabal,” said Alexandra Wagner, the editor of Fader, a magazine that covers emerging music and fashion. It is a club, she noted, that women are only now penetrating in significant numbers."

Not only are their abilities as DJs getting them fashion attention, but the blogosphere is helping.

"They were enlisted, said Margo Brunell, the director of marketing for J. Crew, after being spotted on the Web. “We would look at the blogs and discover that the women who posted there were talking about fashion in one sentence and referencing to a cool D.J. they had seen in the next.”

-Agent Ska-