What is PeekScore?: PeekScore is a rank from 1 to 10, assigned to every person. The higher someone’s score, the “more important” they are on the web. In calculating your PeekScore and updating it often, PeekYou takes into account your known presence and activity on the Internet, including but not limited to; your blogging, participation in social networks, the number of your friends, followers, or readers, the amount of web content you create, and your prominence in the news. For first time visitors a more in-depth explanation of what the PeekScore is, and how to increase your own, can be found by clicking through here.
While competition is the crucial engine driving industry – and some might argue that it’s what inspires all human progress – the “competition” being staged here isn’t driving much of anything meaningful, and is purely for show and to cater to our whim and your amusement. If we were to put the twenty unbearably fabulous women and men listed below in a room together, while they may not have much time for us – the comparative slobs who run the PeekScore blog (and apparently this hypothetical room into which we’d be putting them) – we suspect they’d get along with each other, at least to one another’s faces, more or less fine.
Very recently we took a look at the fashion designers with the highest PeekScores of all. The response to that list was extremely enthusiastic, so – forever interested in giving you good people what you want, as we’ve got a business to run here – we’ve decided to hybridize that previously, foolishly underused PeekScore avenue (fashion) with our introduced, but yet to be exhaustively explored PeekScore Competitions concept (a concept which was also met with a positive response from our readership). This time around, as with last time, it’s a “youngsters vs. veterans” competition; again exploring, in a terribly unscientific way, the notion that social media’s generation gap may not translate to all quarters and industries. But this time we’ve pitted two groupings with a quarter century separating them at the very least, and somewhere in the neighborhood of over 60 years at most; fashion designers, young vs. (um) not quite so young.
Our young designers are not all newcomers, strictly speaking, nor are they all upstarts. Some have been around for quite a few seasons now and are well known. But they are all under 40 which, as it is the new 30, means that they’re all under (new) middle-age. On the other hand our veterans are all, technically speaking, senior citizens (in the “bus pass” and “half-price movies” sense), as – no matter the degrees to which many are still quite actively designing and running their businesses – they all exceed 65.
So, enough jibber jabber, let’s get down to it and see what our young designers are made of here in cyberspace.
AVERAGE PEEKSCORE: 8.00
Curiously, given what we know of both the proclivities of our society’s younger folks, and of the realities of commercial ventures in the modern western world, this is not the most wired-in group of individuals you could ever come across. They may be forward-thinking and hip in many senses, but only about half of them seem to have truly handed themselves over to a rich online existence (for either themselves, personally, or their labels). The fellow at number one is present enough here in cyberspace to have ranked a spot on our Fashion Designers with the Highest PeekScores list, and two others (Sarah Burton and Alexander Wang) would have made that list had we compiled it today, but the remainder – no matter the degree of their name recognition, or success in the press, or even at retail – fell a bit short of that.
But, our elegant and gracefully aged (depending upon your definition of grace) veterans have not yet been analyzed, so let’s not count the youngsters out just yet. Let’s see how our living legends hold up.
AVERAGE PEEKSCORE: 8.17
Well, it would seem – as with our last list of this nature – that the older folks did win. It was close, but experience did equal victory; even if that analysis is hardly fair.
Now, in the interest of facts, it must be acknowledged that these older designers are not all by any means the ones personally updating their Twitters, and Facebooks, and what-have-yous (some, we suspect, may do it some of the time). Why, our number 3 was unwittingly on the record as recently as just this last fall confirming that he has no idea what the heck Facebook is. But they’re successful and quite well-known companies bear their names, and the online presence of those names – which in many cases is considerable – will rightfully influence their PeekScores.
Was it a fair fight? Not really. We pitted international superstars against people mostly best known only in fashion circles.
What have we learned? First and foremost, that PeekScores do what they’re supposed to do, and accurately measure an individual’s impact in cyberspace. We learned, honestly, that as of right now – regardless of whether or not the designers themselves are the impetus for this prominence – the veterans are doing a better job of having their presence felt here on the public web.
And, well, we learned how each of the above designers, only a few of whom were covered on our last list, are doing in the digital footprint department, and we think – particularly to those who care about fashion – that might be pretty interesting in and of itself.
