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CHAPTER 1
A Succession of Quick Leaps
For the casual reader of fashion magazines, it must have seemed that style blogs came out of nowhere. There had been some scattered reports on this growing phenomenon between 2006 and 2008, but nothing to rival the widespread media coverage prompted by the front row placement of a few select bloggers during the Spring/ Summer Ready-to-Wear (RTW) season in September 2009. That season, during which the fashion industry migrates, over four consecutive weeks, from New York to London to Milan to Paris to view the new collections, marked the moment when style blogging as a genre first moved from its position on the fringes of the fashion media to being literally invited into the industry.
Within the global fashion industry, it is widely acknowledged that the four fashion weeks of the annual Spring/Summer RTW season, in addition to the Fall/Winter RTW collections shown each February, are of paramount importance. It is during these periods that the new collections of both established and emergent fashion labels are shown to a largely invite-only audience. These collections designate – and indeed, set the agenda for the trends for the upcoming season, and to be invited is a mark of prestige, an indication of having a place within the competitive and hierarchical fashion industry. Indeed, Entwistle and Rocamora suggest that the primary function of such fashion presentations is for the audience to see and to be seen, the importance of physically being in attendance surpassing the importance of viewing what is displayed on the catwalk (2006: 743).
Guests are issued with either seated or standing tickets for a show and for many, proximity to the catwalk is of crucial importance. As a general rule, the front row is reserved for celebrity VIPs, the corporate owners of the showing label, and fashion critics and editors from the most prestigious fashion and news media publications. From this vantage point, these audience members enjoy an unobstructed view of the catwalk and are also in the best position from which to be viewed by the other guests in attendance (see Entwistle and Rocamora 2006).
Considering these factors, it is little wonder that the news media responded with a furore when a cluster of independent style bloggers began to appear on the front row in 2009. One New York Times article, headlined 'Bloggers crash fashion's front row' read:
[F]ashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated.
(Wilson 2009)
Other prominent news and fashion media outlets ran similar stories with titles such as 'Style bloggers take centre stage' (Financial Times), 'Bloggers take over the front row' (US InStyle magazine) and 'Fashion bloggers, where they belong: In the front row' (Mediaite), all reporting that bloggers were now being recognized as fashion authorities in their own right despite their unorthodox style of reportage (in the case of some, their age) and their relative lack of experience within the industry (see Copping 2009; King 2009; Wilson 2009; Zucker 2009).
That Spring/Summer RTW 2010 fashion season can be seen as style blogging's comingof-age. The front row placement of bloggers at prestigious shows such as Marc Jacobs, Yohji Yamamoto and Dolce and Gabbana indicated a welcome of sorts from the kinds of designers whose work such bloggers had traditionally admired from the remove of their blogs. It was, however, a figurative coming-of-age, as style bloggers were not unequivocally welcomed by the fashion industry, and most will never receive invites to attend such events. What the Spring/Summer RTW 2009 season represented, both to the fashion industry and to bloggers, was that blogs had 'arrived': bloggers' influence and reach as communicators had been recognized by those who had the power to invite them in. This episode can also be conceived of as a savvy PR move on the part of the labels who invited bloggers to sit front row. It aligned these brands with the perceived alternative cool of bloggers whilst engendering lots of news coverage of their shows. So much is evident in a critique of the seating at Dolce and Gabbana made by Scott Schuman, who described the arrangement of front row seats accessorized with laptops as making him (and the other bloggers) look like dancing monkeys while generating 'a humongous amount of press' for the Italian label (Pappademas 2012).
Since that highly publicized moment, style blogging as a practice has grown exponentially, in number, reach and visibility. The total number of fashion-related blogs on the blogosphere numbered two million in 2006 (Corcoran 2006), whereas by 2010, there were two million fashion-related blogs on blogging platform Blogger alone (Rocamora 2011). It is rare to find a contemporary, mainstream fashion magazine for sale that does not feature at least one style blogger somewhere within its pages, either as a guest columnist, an interviewee or someone whose self-shot outfit photographs are printed as a source of visual inspiration for readers. Of course, for every style blogger enjoying widespread recognition, there are countless others who blog in relative obscurity. They too post photographs of their daily outfits, write about the items they covet and reblog images from fashion campaigns and editorials. Collectively, all of these personal style blogs constitute the style blogosphere, a vast and networked conglomerate of blogs with the shared focus on the personal style and fashion interest of individual bloggers.
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of style blogs and their development and diversification as a distinct sub-genre of the fashion blogosphere. I define style blogs and outline their distinct generic characteristics, distinguishing them from the other subgenres that comprise the fashion blogosphere, before mapping the origins of personal style blogging through the archive, tracing the earliest fashion blogs and drawing on the oral histories of two of the first fashion bloggers to sketch a portrait of what the early days of fashion blogging were like. I also trace the multitude of websites and forums that precipitated the emergence of personal style blogging as a distinct sub-genre in order to demonstrate that it did not spring from the ether but has tangible connections to prior digital practices.
In the final part of this chapter, I identify two distinct periods of personal style blogging, which I name first wave and second wave style blogging, to demonstrate its mutable composition, ever-shaped as it is by the contributions of the people who blog it into being as well as the digital environment within which it originally flourished. The way that people 'do' style blogging is not fixed but has and will continue to change. This is only to be expected from a medium, which like both the Internet that made its existence possible and fashion itself, 'lives on the principle of permanent change' (Lovink 2008: xi).
What is a style blog?
To commence a discussion about style blogs, we first need to understand what they are. The word 'blog' stems from 'weblog' (a contraction of the words 'web' and 'log'), a term that dates back to the late 1990s (Rocamora and Bartlett 2009: 105). It derives from the form the first blogs took: logs of links to other blogs and websites (see Blood 2000). A blog, then, can be defined as an online platform for the regular publication (or 'posting') of short texts, images and videos, created and maintained by an individual. Posts are arranged in reverse chronological order, and are either archived by month or categorized according to keywords, or both. They are often comprised of a blend of original content produced by a blogger, be it images, text or video, and content that is reblogged from other websites and publications, selected and organized according to that blogger's personal taste. On most blogs, readers are able to comment on posts, their response displayed in a stream of comments from other users, which subsequent readers are able to view by clicking the 'comments' link under each post.
Personal blogs are often written from the first-person perspective, 'a platform for the exchange of anecdotes and personal reflections' that, in style, are 'rarely polished', likened by Rocamora and Bartlett to 'a genre of "chatter"' (2009: 106). Indeed, blogging is characterized by its informal, conversational tone and its highly individualized, publicly shared content. Most blogs have a central identifying theme around which the majority of the content is organized, be it politics, food, motherhood, music, the daily life of the blogger or, in the case of style blogs, fashion and personal style. Style blogs, then, are a particular kind of fashion-based weblog in which the content is particularly focused on fashion and style as it pertains to and is practised in the life of the blogger.
Style bloggers make no claim to objectivity; unlike industry-based fashion blogs (such as those run by magazines, labels or fashion critics), their blogs represent an individual's opinion, rather than a corporate position. This is evident in the words of self-professed 'fashion geek' Susie Lau, who said of starting her own blog, that she wanted:
[...] to keep it quite personal. By personal, I don't mean that in a 'Dear Diary' kind of way but I mean Style Bubble is about blogging my own observations, thoughts and experiences in fashion, making use of my daily fashion life, in the shops that I encounter, the trends that I try, the ups and downs of my style, the designers that I come across.
(Jacob 2008)
As is the case with traditional media, including publicity material generated in the wider fashion industry, a style blog must have a 'point of view': a distinct perspective that sets one apart from one's peers, attracting their attention and, perhaps, their admiration. This emphasis on individuality and the importance of individual perspective is demonstrated in the kind of content that is central to style blogs, most of which is an iteration, whether literal or not, of a blogger's personal taste in clothing, what will here be called their 'style'. On this blogosphere, style is primarily demonstrated by the publication of a series of photographs of a blogger posing in an outfit of their own styling, known as outfit posts. They are the defining feature of this sub-genre, differentiating personal style blogs from other types of fashion-based weblogs.
Outfit posts have been a key feature of style blogs since they began to appear on the blogosphere (see George 2009; Palmgren 2010; Rocamora 2011). The conventions of outfit posts include a blogger styling a range of garments and accessories from their own wardrobe (and, increasingly, clothing that is sent to them by labels and PR companies) and assuming a series of poses for multiple photographs, which they then edit and upload. Bloggers often cite the designer or provenance of the garments they are wearing in their images and usually write some brief accompanying text about their clothing or their recent activities. While originally a catalogue of the blogger's daily outfits, over time these posts have largely transformed into the display of outfits styled for the purposes of being blogged. I will discuss this development in more detail in Chapter Four.
The content of personal style blogs is not limited to outfit posts, of course. While some blogs are more or less exclusively comprised of these types of posts, many also post an array of other fashion-related information. The catch-all 'other information' covers a vast and ever-adapting array of content, as style blogging is a genre that is formed and re-formed as bloggers contribute to it. The content of style blogs, then, as with many other genres of blogs, usually comprises of a mix of reblogged and original content. Content that is commonly reblogged includes (but is not limited to) scans of editorial (the industry term for the fashion photographic spreads particular to fashion magazines), advertising campaigns, lookbooks (a collection of photographs styled and collated to display a label's new fashion collection) and fashion films released by fashion labels and houses, stills from the catwalks of fashion weeks and street style photographs taken from other blogs.
It is more common for externally produced fashion imagery to be reblogged than fashion criticism or written content, which is in keeping with fashion's character as a primarily visual medium. An example of this can be found on Australian style blog Oracle Fox. Its blogger, Amanda 'Mandy' Shadforth, explained that she started her blog 'because I felt like I needed somewhere to put all of the images that I loved' (Revlon Australia 2013). In April 2011 alone, Mandy posted lookbooks from labels Lucette, Wildfox, Young Huntings, Shakuhachi, Opening Ceremony and others, as well as editorial imagery from magazines such as West End, Harper's Bazaar Australia and Oyster, street style blogs and photo-sharing website Flickr (see Oracle Fox, April 2011). That said, reblogging is less common on the contemporary style blogosphere as producing original content has become a point of pride for bloggers, a way of asserting legitimacy and a unique point of view. Where content is reblogged now is usually due to a blogger publishing externally produced content that they were featured in: Susie Bubble publishing a selection of street style shots taken of her during fashion month, say, or Rhea Gupte reblogging an editorial she shot with Cosmopolitan India (see Gupte, Fuss, 2014).
Mixed with this externally produced content is material created by bloggers. As well as outfit post imagery, this content may include independent coverage of the happenings of the fashion industry; reviews or reports on the shows of the fashion weeks of leading fashion cities (New York, London, Milan, Paris) or those of their blogger's respective countries of residence; a blogger's personal reflections on fashion and style; recounts of the events of their daily lives (though these usually refer back to fashion and style in some way); advice to readers about how to recreate items designed by fashion labels on a budget, or guides on how to do things, such as apply make-up looks or tell if an alleged luxury good is genuine or fake; and reviews and recommendations on brands that they like or are promoting through their blog.
Laia Garcia's blog Geometric Sleep illustrates this kind of content. Since the blog's inception in 2006, Laia has published reviews of New York Fashion Week shows alongside reposted imagery from the catwalk and posted photographs of products that she wanted or regretted not buying as well as outfit posts. Figures 2 and 3 show some of the variety of this content.
In 'Short and studded, Laia discusses the benefits of the pictured Pour La Victoire boots in the kind of personalized vernacular inherent to the blogosphere: they remind her of Alexander Wang booties 'without the crazy price tag or (the obviously intentional/ironic) street-girl vibe' (Garcia 2009c). In the post overleaf (Figure 2), titled 'Let's get real fashion-y for a minute', Laia critiques the choice of models American Vogue published on a billfold cover for their May 2009 issue. She allocates or deducts points for the choice of each model against whether or not she is truly (according to Laia) a 'model of the moment' (as the magazine claims), and then suggests four replacement models who, for her, better fit the moniker (see Garcia 2009b). Figure 3 also displays a screenshot of one of Laia's outfit posts, in which she blogs about a t-shirt designed by then-fellow blogger Tavi and photographs it as part of two different outfits (Garcia 2009a).
Indeed, style bloggers can, and do, write and post pictures on anything they find interesting from the world of fashion, be it the fashion industry itself, fashion as a concept, or fashion as it is realized in their own lives. Ultimately, regardless of the form it takes, the two central themes of all of the content on a style blog are fashion and personal style. These are often virtually inextricably linked, as the fashion imagery on a blog – whether comprised of photographs of products they wish to buy or reblogged editorial content – is usually posted because it appeals to the blogger's own taste, thus functioning as another iteration of their style. By the same token, a blogger's personal style is visually represented both by this kind of imagery and their self-produced outfit posts, the accompanying text of which often describes why they are wearing these particular clothes and accessories.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Personal Style Blogs"
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