I recently watched “The State of Fashion Blogging” video from Fashion Pirate, my favourite blogger/person at the moment, and wanted to dump a bunch of my opinions into a text post to get this blog going.
In short, her video spoke about how the blogging community is in ruins at the moment. I was going to go on to summarize the video but then I realized you could just watch it yourself.
One of the comments (on the second page) said: “I blame websites such as tumblr in all honesty. Although I do like to browse, it seems most bloggers are on a quest for fame alone. There’s nothing new to see and nothing very erm, personal about current blogging… If you catch my drift. I want to see the opinion and style of the blogger and not that of the masses.
It seems now to be just a bunch of pastel haired clone’s pumping the joy’s of size zero. Fashion blogs nowadays are lacking individuality. Much praise for speaking out btw.”
Now of course I -an avid user of tumblr- am obviously going to feel offended by this, but I can see where this person is coming from.
I couldn't even link to the kind of blog they spoke of because there are just too many… and that was the exact point of the video and the comments. Very few of the so-called “fashion” blogs that arise from tumblr are unique, at least from what I have seen. Obviously, tumblogs for magazines such as Teen Vogue or LouLou or Flare are going to be on the “magazine side” of fashion, as Arabelle talked about in her video. The other side should be people running unique blogs that showcase their own personal style and interests. Instead, it’s teen girls who reblog pictures of Starbucks drinks and blonde girls wearing “hipster” clothing (oh how I loathe the use of that term, more on that another day).
In my opinion, tumblr is not to blame for the state of fashion blogging. Tumblr makes it easy for people who don’t necessarily have to know anything about fashion or their own personal style to create a page and call it fashion blogging. I’m only just getting familiar with Wordpress and Blogger, and from what I’ve seen, it has less social features (such as messaging, reblogging, replying) than tumblr, which is probably why it is more common for “real” fashion bloggers to use. You could say Wordpress/Blogger are more personal, because they force you to write about yourself, the clothes, and your opinions, rather than just reblog what other people probably stole from WeHeartIt. Honestly, I don’t think of those tween/teen girls reblogging cutoffs and frappuccinos to be fashion blogging anyway, so we just need to suck it up and wade through those blogs until you find something you like.
I also think another reason fashion blogging has become dull and repetitive is that blogging (not even just fashion blogging) has become so popular that there are just too many of these people (I was going to say us, but I definitely don’t consider myself a fashion blogger just yet). Back when people like Tavi Gevinson and Arabelle were making their Blogspot webpages, I don’t think blogging was as mainstream or popular as it is now, which probably contributes to Tavi’s popularity (aside from the fact that she was 11).
