The issue of vanity that might inform the obsessive chronicling of one's wardrobe does come up with some of the bloggers (the adults more than the teens). Speaking from her home in London, personal fashion blogging pioneer Susie Lau, 25, said it's something she's thought about since she started her blog Style Bubble in 2006.
"It is to a degree a little bit vain, but I don't think I could get my point across any better" than taking photos of my outfit, says Lau, who once created a pie chart to document the percentage of her clothes that were vintage, designer, handmade, young designer. "If I wasn't talking about personal style and only talking about fashion as a third-person subject, it would take away what the blog is really all about -- my personal relationship to fashion.
Aldridge is more succinct. "I'm totally in touch with my narcissism," she said.
But Agnes Rocamora, a senior research fellow and senior lecturer of cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion who has just started to research the fashion blogs, thinks it's too easy to dismiss these websites as a self-serving exercise. "Fashion is an everyday performance of the self, so is it narcissistic to chronicle it? In a way, but so what?" she says, adding that "these are people who are creative about fashion, and the bottom line is the blogs are about exchanging ideas."
Traditionally, the personal style blogs have been produced and consumed by people who are solidly outside of the fashion industry, but that is starting to change.
For his fall 2008 line, Marc Jacobs named a bag after fashion blogging phenomenon Bryan Boy, and L.A. designers Rodarte sent a pair of their netted tights to a 12-year-old fashion blogger (you read that right), causing a stir in the fashion-style blogosphere. During this past Paris Fashion Week, Rumi Neely, the popular San Diego-based blogger behind Fashion Toast, was flown to the Ungaro show after a picture from her site wound up on designer Esteban Cortazar's inspiration board. She was given a dress to wear to his show and sat in the front row.
The entire experience, of course, is documented on her blog.
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deborah.netburn@latimes.com
