Crosby Noricks The San Diego Fashion PR Girl
BY: NATALIE BUI
We probably all have been familiar with Aliza Licht, the trendy superwoman behind DKNY’s public relations girl, as she brings us all the enchanting behind-the-scenes fashion shows, V.I.P parties scenes, and sneak peak fashion lines right from New York City. However, San Diego has our own unconventional Fashion PR Girl, and she’s made it big too – in a scholarly sense: Crosby Noricks. As the founder of PRCouture.com, she gives us the inside scoop of what happens in the realm of the fashion PR industry and what it is all about. “Back when I was in grad school, there wasn’t anything about fashion PR. No one was investigating the trade and academia of it – it wasn’t actually even considered real PR. Is fashion PR the ‘softer’ PR? Is it less strategic than corporate PR? Are the pre-conceived notions of fashion being superficial and snooty- true?” That’s how PR Couture started back in 2006 – all because of self-interest in the fashion world, Crosby began to blog. She began interviewing people to feature on her website and established an online forum to question and utilize fashion PR,
in a time where fashion PR wasn’t taken too seriously yet. It began this mini-revolution, allowing visibility behind scenes, changing the negative stigmas of the fashion world, and proving how powerfully reflective fashion PR is in retrospect to our modern culture. “You know, they are not a bunch of vapid, dippy girls running this industry. They are entrepreneurial, business minded, strategic, smart, and talented women. I wanted to share their story.” And with these young workers’ growing independent fashion agencies, we see that Fashion PR is not any softer or strategic than corporate PR. “In fact, it is an empowering, feminist step into the industry for women,” she claims. Sex doesn’t have to be the only thing that sells. The ‘Look Book’ isn’t the only way to show case outfits. These women have to find new, creative approaches and outlets on advertising information everyday. “In an industry that is so aesthetically driven, visually focused, and celebrity-based it becomes a lot about first impressions. You have to keep track of who likes what and when, what story is published
and where… As a publicist, you are working on current shows for the season and the future ones as well. You gotta be ahead of the game, but you gotta be in the present at the same time. It requires an ability to multi-task and juggle 100,000 things at once… sometimes you do get burnt out!” Crosby laughs. Fashion Publicists are essentially communicating on behalf of the brand, constantly innovating new strategies and tactics for the company, and are the game changers to how we perceive the fashion world. Not only are they the right hand man to the brand name, but they are also stylist advisers, telling them what to wear at the awards shows, fixing budgets, and negotiating contracts and deals, signing models. These women in the industry are inspiring, powerful, and unfeigned. They give us the honest truth of what we want to see. Whatever our culture is ready to see, they bring it out, and what we aren’t ready for yet, fashion publicists plans on how to bring it into the playing field. They “create things, build things, and then brand things,” as Crosby puts it. They are the brains and
the heart for the company, tying all the glamorous and the not so glamorous together. Fashion PR means you have to know a little bit of everything, with a cross over between business and creativity. And with PRCouture. com we get to see the tricks of the trades and the different start up stories and functions of designers and branders. Her newly released book “The PR Couture Guide to Breaking Into Fashion PR” is a useful manual to aspire young college women in hopes to cracking their heels into the industry. Forget Yahoo’s generic news on “The Best Interview Tips” or “ 10 Things to Not Put Onto Your Resume.” Crosby is sharing advice that she wish she had when she was younger, exposing the top PR agency’s contacts, actual interview questions from these agencies, and even how to use twitter as a job search tool. For starters, what’s the first piece of advice she offers to aspiring bloggers and tumbler users? “If you are not just posting anything and everything that has the word ‘fashion’ in it, and you are writing things that you are genuinely interested in, then it translates. It reads.”