Sade Strehlke started her journalism career as a sofa fashionista, covering New York Fashion Week from her apartment in Beverly Hills, Calif. After her blog, “The Icon Concierge,” took off, she upgraded to attending fashion extravaganzas as a runway reporter.
Born and raised in New York City, Ms. Strehlke, 27, went to private school in Manhattan before leaving for the University of Southern California. After graduation, she stayed in California for a few years with her husband, Nicholas, and worked as a publicist for a consumer technology agency.
But her heart was always on the runway, and when attempts to land a job in fashion P.R. proved unsuccessful, she started her own fashion site.
Within a year “The Icon Concierge” attracted more than 10,000 Twitter followers and received more than 50,000 page views per month, she said. She covered events such as the Chanel show in Paris and Rodarte debuting its first couture collection in Florence, Italy. At one point, Ms. Strehlke managed correspondents in Paris and Holland.
Despite her blogging success, she found that her favorite fashion stories were not 100-word blog posts but long-form articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
“The writing was so vivid you get lost in it,” she said. “It wasn’t just a picture of a girl in a dress. It brought you to the show.”
She put her blog on hold and returned to New York to pursue that type of reporting at the Columbia School of Journalism.
On her South Bronx beat, her experience as a fashion blogger helped her tackle government corruption and the stop-and-frisk policy because contacting big-shot fashion designers gave her the confidence to email anyone. The 10,000 emails in her inbox, she said, tell her story.
“Interviewing Mayor Bloomberg was no big deal,” she said. “I had just emailed Karl Lagerfeld’s office for a show, which was much bigger for me.”
This summer she will intern at WSJ Magazine. From that experience and The New York Times Student Institute, she hopes to learn to report the vivid details that will take her readers to the runway.