Perhaps no moment encapsulates the existential dilemma of fashion bloggers than Julie Frederickson's strange, abortive interview with Vogue's Anna Wintour last September in the tents of Bryant Square Park. Frederickson is editor-in-chief of Coutorture, a blog network that has built a rudimentary, parallel fashion media universe as an alternative to the powers-that-be in the form of Vogue, Style.com, and Full Frontal Fashion. Coutorture's network now includes 209 member blogs aggregating 7 million pageviews a month -- it gained 60 member blogs last fall in the aftermath of Fredrickson's Fashion Week Wintour coup.

Better yet, she gently forced IMG, the sports and modeling agency which owns Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, to revise its video policy in order to accommodate the footage she compiles for the benefit of her member blogs. Willing to interview any luminary she stumbles across, Fredrickson managed to capture Wintour during September's spring show season, minding her own front-row business. In the clip that survived the encounter, a composed Fredrickson (at least she wasn't visibly shaking, which would have been most tent-dwellers' reaction) asks a handful of Fashion Week 101 questions which Wintour very gracefully answers, presumably as she would to anyone of the fashion media's lower orders, until apoplectic publicist Kelly Cutrone put the kibosh on the encounter after barely a minute.

The three formed an intriguing power triangle. What is Fredrickson in the grand scheme of things? An outsider and interloper, as Cutrone obviously seems to think? (Cutrone even has a code of conduct for ungrateful people like her.) Or is she a professional peer, at least in an abstract sense, of Citizen Anna? And, most importantly: Which path does Fredrickson prefer?

"We wanted to create a viable alternative for fashion sites that wanted something a little different," she says. "We never tried to be accepted by the mainstream, and we've been accepted by them for exactly that reason," she says, hinting at potential partnerships with other brands. "A lot of bloggers are blogging to be accepted, and that's not necessarily how you should go about it. A lot of bloggers are very, very bitter because they're not successful at this. They're angry because they're not being recognized." This season is the second in which bloggers have been officially ushered into the tents as their own special subset of the press. "I'm actually shocked at how easy it is this season," Fredrickson marvels. "I think we've got it down pretty pat." On average, she's taping five to seven interviews each day, including one backstage on Monday with Oscar de la Renta. To hear Fashion Week executive director Fern Mallis tell it, she sounds happy just to have the extra bodies in the seats. With 221 shows on the calendar this season, there may not be enough media to go around, a state of affairs that had Eric Wilson of the New York Times grumbling on Monday.

To fill the gaps, then, are bloggers from sites like Glam.com, FashionTribes, Face Hunter and Coutorture. "Just as fashion evolves and grows, the media in our world and universe evovles and changes with it, and we constantly look at the way people consume and enjoy fashion," Mallis says, explaining her decision last season to grant access to bloggers. "When we started the shows here in 1993, no one even had a digital camera. These are credible journalists, and if that's the way news is being distributed, then we want to be a part of it."

The democratization of fashion has gone hand-in-hand with the democratization of the fashion press, but fashion bloggers split from their self-publishing peers on a key issue. They are more or less unconflicted about their desire to be adopted by the mainstream media that most political bloggers despise and would dismantle given half the chance. Obviously, there's a big difference between 60 Minutes' National Guard memos and the verdict on last night's Marc Jacobs show, but it's still telling that unlike in other fields, bloggers challenge the moral supremacy of fashion media establishment in the same way their peers do in just about every other sector.

I'm talking about those "who are blogging for access," as Fashionista editor Faran Krentcil puts it. "The fashion world in general is aspirational, and I think it would be silly to not recognize these blogs as such. These people want to be working for Anna [Wintour], but they might be living in Ohio," where they can only hope their wittily blogged insights catch the eye of a fairy fashion godmother.

The fantasies embodied in the film version of The Devil Wears Prada and television show Ugly Betty only help fuel that dream, no matter how improbable it might seem. "Everybody wants their 15 minutes, and if they want to be treated as serious journalists and think that's the way to do it, well, bless them," Mallis says. "I'm not sure we have enough hours in the day to read all of the commentary they publish, though."

But, Krentcil also points out that the fashion world's grudging-but-quickening adoption of the Web has been a boon for the junior staffers previously relegated to the glossies' salt mines as assistants, who have recast themselves as the ones in touch with what the kids are up to these days. Krentcil points to Condé Nast's just-launched Flip.com, and to the MySpace-hosted blogs of Teen Vogue and Nylon as examples of outlets where young assistants have found a measure of fashion journalism fulfillment that fetching dry cleaning can't quite match. Krentcil even counts herself among those who've benefited from such shifts. After starting as a reporter for The Daily, the delirious house organ of Fashion Week, she signed on with blogger impresario (and former mediabistro.com editor-in-chief) Elizabeth Spiers to launch Fashionista just a few weeks ago. "I'm 25; I'm a young writer," she says. "It worked for me."

Yes, but she was already in the thick of the social scrum -- the shows, the parties, the after-parties and the socialite dinners that comprise fashion's off-seasons. The desire may be there, but it remains to be seen whether fashion bloggers will collectively make the leap as fashion's farm team.

The greatest success story that fashion blogging has yet produced is Scott Schuman, a.k.a. The Sartorialist. Schuman was a fringe player in the industry before starting his photoblog a year and a half ago. He began by prowling Manhattan with a digital camera, snapping arresting photos of street fashion and pithily explaining in captions why a particular combination of details had caught his eye. For various reasons -- including his residual glow of access to the fashion firmament -- Schuman's became the go-to blog for the New York style set, acquiring a status that eventually won him an audience with Men.Style.com executive editor Tyler Thoreson, who dispatched Schuman to Milan a few seasons back to document the plumage of the editors attending the shows.

"That was my coming-out party, and I was smart enough to know that this was my chance to make a statement," Schuman recalls. "I bought the right clothes and talked to the right people when I was over there, which really impressed the people at Men.Style.com. Once they say me at the shows and saw how many people I knew, they knew they had made the right call." A low-level bidding war even erupted between Condé Nast's men's fashion magazines for the rights to publish Schuman's finds in their pages, with GQ winning that round. At the moment, he receives a page of his own in each issue of GQ, putting Schuman on par with Glenn O'Brien's eternal column, "The Style Guy."

What made his blog rise above other fashion sites, says Schuman, was his combination of consistency, the ability to both write and take photographs, and -- perhaps most important -- the capacity to generate nearly all of his own content. Unlike most fashion bloggers, Schuman isn't riffing on the same runway shots as everyone else; he's inventing his own separate taxonomy of style. "The end game," he says, "is to become a real, true fashion voice and point of view, right up there with [New York Times fashion critic] Cathy Horyn and [International Herald Tribune critic] Suzy Menkes, and anyone that people look to for a voice and fashion opinion."

All anyone ever wants in fashion, it seems, is a front-row seat. "I don't really have any specific goals. I'm just here to enjoy the shows I wanted to see," says student-cum-fashion blogger Tommye Fitzpatrick, editor of Fashionologie.com. " I'm just hoping to get into the industry in some way shape or form, whether it be PR, a magazine, or even through a Web site."

Greg Lindsay is a freelance writer.