sartorial musings : where have all the real fashion bloggers gone?
I have been an avid reader of fashion blogs on the interwebs since I was fifteen years old (and now I am ancient, so it has been quite a while) and have spent countless hours pouring over these blogs, admiring the personal style and lusting after the clothes of these very stylish women.
So I have a bit of a problem with the way things in the fashion blog world are going at the moment. It’s making me uncomfortable. And giving me an inferiority complex (or at least making the existing one worse). My problem is the disappearance of “real” on these blogs.
In the last few years or so, I have begun to notice some subtle changes taking place over these blogs that I once so adored. The photographs look clear and sharp. Stores and designers are name-dropped every second sentence. The blogger’s whole body is in the shot (including their shoes! HOW?) and everything just looks so goddamn polished.
Gone are the dodgy MySpace-style self-portraits with the arm clearly visible, the grainy webcam shots of girls contorted into awkward positions to ensure their whole outfit makes the cut and the off-centre self-timer photographs where the camera has clearly been balanced on a slightly-too-tall bookshelf.
Introduced in their place: perfect, clear, in-focus, colour-corrected glamour shots of the bloggers in their $12,325 Isabel Marant jacket and $5,867 Alexander Wang heels. These girls appear to have full-time photographers constantly on the scene to capture their perfectly spontaneous, chic moments (oh what? You’re just standing around in the street with your DSLR? This is such a coincidence! Hey, I guess you may as well take a quick snap of my outfit while we’re both here). I’m looking at you, Rumi Neely!
Everyone looks perfect. And unblemished. And they stink of money. I just stink, because I was kind of in a hurry this morning and forgot to put on deodorant. But I digress.
I don’t actually want to look at perfect pictures of size zero Barbie girls wearing clothes that I could never afford, even in my wildest, wettest dreams (hello clunky Miu Miu heels- nice to see you again). I am BORED WITH THIS NOW.
I want to see real girls, dirty girls with unbrushed hair, wearing their own clothes (not weird wet-look gold leggings that have been mailed to them by American Apparel that they would probably never choose themselves). What’s so wrong with photographs of girls that are real, girls who don’t have the time (or frankly, the inclination) to edit out every perceived imperfection on Photoshop before they post? What’s wrong with having a freckle on your cheek, or an abnormally large gap between your eyebrows (just me?)? What’s wrong with just being real?
Now, I am not saying that I hate these blogs. I still read them for the fashion eye candy, and I guess vague ideas for potential outfits. But I just think they have been done to death.
So from one dirty, un-airbrushed girl to (hopefully) a few others; I say bring back the dodgy webcam shots. If I wanted to look at a proper fashion shoot, I would pick up a Vogue (and I do!).
By Jane Boulton
I don’t read any fashion blogs (except this one, of course) but just reading what you say makes me sick. I think the more popular a “grassroots” field becomes, the higher the entry barrier becomes, as the general quality of that field rises with it’s popularity. However, I think in this situation, the creativity would also decline, as people have more other blogs to model. This opens the door for new, grungy blogs which have the qualities you describe, such as having cameras poorly balanced on bookshelves etc. The expensive ones just pave the way for grunge ones and vice versa!!!!!!!
I find there are now very few fashion (or beauty) bloggers who aren’t being endorsed by some company, or sent samples to promote. It’s become a competitive field and designers are jumping at the chance to reach a larger audience at a far inexpensive manner than paying for commercial advertising.
I too miss the days of beauty blogs being raw and unpolished.
Your post is true! It reminds me of something I read on Jezebel – http://jezebel.com/5899546/jane-aldridges-parents-gave-her-several-hundred-thousand-dollars-to-spend-on-shoes
Crazy stuff!
Wow Erin! I mean, I knew Jane Aldridge came from money but that is just crazy…the world of fashion blogging is almost just fantasy now.
Gosh, I remember those days. When they were average Jane’s ‘What I wore today’ and you could tell it was literally what they’d put together before heading to work. Can we bring that back?
I feel the same about blogging in general. Blogging and vlogging reached this beautiful peak where there was an abundance of quirky, creative, new things happening and now I feel like it has tipped. There’s an overabundance, it seems so formulaic and money has replaced passion. I love blogs and there are some real gems out there, but it’s frustrating having to sift through the shiny adverts posing as blogs to get to the real, gritty stuff.