Okay, so I’m not sure if you’ve heard but all over the internet there are these insane women who take photos of themselves wearing clothes and it’s like all so crazy.
Why are we so obsessed with fashion bloggers? Scratch that. Why am I so obsessed with fashion bloggers?
I think I first stumbled across a fashion blog when I was 16 or so. I was a bit of an Internet derp back then, didn’t have Bebo til TY, didn’t jump on the Facebook train til I was 17 and now I’m never off the thing. Anyway, I digress.
So the first fashion blog I discovered was llymlrs.com and it is still my favourite to this day. There was me, legging it home, trying to remember the blog urls, sitting there crying in my maroon jumper, skirt and tights, (school uniform, hardly by choice) bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t a leggy blonde with Topshop’s entire new collection. It’s just an accident of birth that my father is not Sir Philip Green, His Royal Lordship of Topshop.
I don’t have a boyfriend to drag outside to take pictures of me looking down at the ground, usually wearing sunglasses, sometimes smiling at that leaf on the ground or something. Oh wait, there I am looking at the ground from another angle. No uninventive bedroom mirror selfies around here.
I wish that was my life. Basically I’m lucky if I can eat and pay my rent with my week’s wages, let alone own every Zara bag under the sun, much to my endless disappointment. “Blogger hype” is something that enrages many. One blogger discovers that pair of Topshop studded boots or that amazing breakout treatment and soon they all own it. It’s not necessarily a copycat element, more a community element. You can see the friendships forged between bloggers, there they are having the lolz on Instagram at blogger events, getting yet more free stuff. The rage.
To think about it is a little bit mindblowing, these stylish and sometimes not (matter of personal opinion) folk seem to have the lives of Reilly but not everyone knows about them. Boys I know are completely oblivious, my dad doesn’t read one blog post I write unless I email him the link and as for my granddad, he has absolutely no concept of what a blog or a blogger is. Don’t even get me started on YouTube, vloggers would be far too much for them to comprehend.
That’s the thing too. Bloggers are able to reach us everywhere, because we have accounts on every social network. First there’s the blog which you can follow by all manner of means – Bloglovin, Google Friend Connect, then they want you to follow them on Twitter. Soon the blog has a Facebook page and clearly your life will be miserable if you don’t like said page, Instagram came along and we all love to filter our daily lives beyond belief and of course follow our favourite bloggers on it. Then there’s YouTube.
Once they’ve had enough of posting words and pictures, it’s time for a YouTube channel where we can see outfit of the day videos, watch them natter on about their monthly beauty favourites, or the most gas – vlogs, where we can see them walk around talking to their iPhone screen about all of the lolz they’re having. Crazy, right?
Traditional media even still can’t get their heads around the astronomical rise of the fashion blogger. Front row residents at Fashion Week and they don’t even spell all the words right all of the time? It cannot be. To think someone three years older than me, who still can’t distinguish between “their” and “there” but still dresses so much better is just too much to take.
The thing is, when someone looks at a style blog, something happens to her. I can guarantee that her first thought will pretty much always be, “I could do that.” It’s a simple format, and we all probably could do it. Maybe it’s an Irish thing, but we’re not mad for the self publishing and self publicising phenomenon. I can only imagine the slagging that would go down at home should I ever drag someone into taking photos of me, but if Paul Galvin’s doing it, then why shouldn’t we?
I don’t care, I still love them. There’s even a blog (the irony) called Fashion Bloggers, Why?, calling out fashion bloggers in need of an “intervention.” WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST LIVE TOGETHER HAPPILY ON THE INTERNET? JEEZ.
Is there really any need for another fashion blog? They all have to get old sometime, they can’t wear their Jeffrey Campbell Litas forever, and as long as style blogs are popular, that void will need to be filled. Just not by me.
Claire Healy
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