Fashion insider Patty Huntington launched her eponymous blog, [frockwriter], in 2008. She has been covering the industry for 20 years, writing for WWD and T Magazine to name a few. Patty's fashion news blog is based in Australia and has become a worldwide success with over 50,000 followers a month. We had the chance to interview Patty and hear about her intriguing journalism encounters as well as industry inspirations.To learn more about Patty take a look below:

1. How did you get your start in blogging?
I was working as a journalist for 20 years before I started blogging. First in radio in Paris, then magazines, newspapers and television. I started working online the minute the world did, in 1995, for research and to track TV talent. In 2006, while I was working as the fashion reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, its online site smh.com.au asked me to supplement my print coverage of Australian Fashion Week with a blog and video. Cranked the blog up again four months later to cover the Spring/Summer 2007 shows simultaneously for both the paper and smh.com.au, with daily backstage reports, celeb interviews etc from New York, London, Milan and Paris. I quit the print edition to cover Fall/Winter 2007/2008 on the ground exclusively for smh.com.au and was then approached by News Ltd’s Australian online news portal news.com.au to be their fashion reporter.I launched the Fully Chic blog there and covered Spring/Summer 2008. One year later, the funding was pulled so I launched [frockwriter]on July 4, 2008. After blogging for mainstream media outlets for two years, Independence Day seemed like a great day to go out on my own.


2. What is the most exciting or outrageous thing that you have come across while on the job?
The antics at ACTUEL magazine in Paris – whose radio I worked for and which shared offices - were audacious. They sent reporters undercover into high schools, the Vatican, Afghanistan, wherever. That's what first inspired me to be a journalist. Back in Australia, the current affairs TV shows I worked on were an adrenalin rush. You can be deployed at a moment’s notice by road, plane or helicopter to chase/cover any kind of story. In the four years I’ve been blogging there have been many times when I have been taken aback by the nuclear reactions to posts. In 2008 I asked “This Polish teenager was 13 when this photo was taken, do you have a problem with it?”, about a highly sexualized wet swimsuit shot of a then 13 year-old Monika ‘Jac’ Jagaciak, the face of that year’s Australian Fashion Week. Three days later, all under-16 were banned from the event. All I wanted to know was why IMG had green lit the shot.

3. Are you a Mac or a PC?
Mac. Bought my first in 1989.

4. Who is one person you are dying to interview dead or alive?
Steven Meisel, so influential, yet so enigmatic. Or my father: a commando, menswear designer/manufacturer and entrepreneur, who has been a major influence in spite of the fact that he died when I was two.

5. Where is your favorite place to see street style?
Street style is everywhere, really. I haven’t as yet done that much street style on [frockwriter], however I often shoot ‘They Are Wearing’ photo galleries for WWD (I’ve been their Australian correspondent since 1996). If I’m short on time, I travel to the the Intersection at Glenmore Road/Oxford Street in Paddington, Sydney. This location always delivers a maximum number of cool, well pulled-together outfits.

6. What film is most inspiring to you when it comes to fashion?
It’s hard to go past Roger Vadim’s Barbarella(1968). Paco Rabanne, who did the costumes, was in his prime and it’s been redone a gazillion times in editorial.

7. What is your fashion week must-have?
My BlackBerry. Sure a DSLR camera is now essential, ditto a laptop or netbook, not to mention good wifi – otherwise you’re stuffed if you need to upload images straight off the runway. But for real-time coverage, it's a mobile journalist’s all-in-one workstation. I use it to upload images to Twitter, the blog, live stream show/backstage video using an application called Qik and backstage audio recordings instantly to Posterous using VoiceNotes. Even before Smartphones, I filed daily coverage of the Milan Fall/Winter 2006/2007 shows exclusively by BlackBerry to The Sydney Morning Herald news desk when I couldn’t get any joy out of my hotel’s internet connection.