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Intellect Books - Rosie Findlay

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158 pages

English

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Description

From Style Rookie to Style Bubble, personal style blogs exploded onto the scene in the mid-2000s giving voice to young and stylish writers who had their own unique take on the seasonal fashion cycle and how to curate an individual style within the shifting swirl of trends. Personal Style Blogs examines the history and rise of style blogging and looks closely at the relationship between bloggers and their (often anonymous) readers as well as the response of the fashion industry to style bloggers’ amateur and often unauthorized fashion reportage.

The book charts the development of the style blogosphere and its transformation from an alternative, experimental space to one dominated by the fashion industry. Complete with examples of several famous fashion bloggers, such as Susie Lau, Rumi Neely and Tavi Gevinson, the author explores notions of individuality, aesthetics and performance on both sides of the digital platform. Findlay asks: what can style blogging teach us about women’s writing and the performance of a private self online? And what drives style bloggers to carve a space for themselves online?

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Succession of Quick Leaps

Chapter 2: Blogging the Bedroom

Chapter 3: Intimacy at a Distance

Chapter 4: Performing Fashion’s Imaginary

Chapter 5: Style Bloggers and the Contested Field of Fashion

Conclusion

References

Index

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Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 septembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781783208364
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Alex Szalbot
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Indexer: Silvia Benvenuto
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-834-0
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-835-7
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-836-4
Printed and bound by Page Bros, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Succession of Quick Leaps
Chapter 2: Blogging the Bedroom
Chapter 3: Intimacy at a Distance
Chapter 4: Performing Fashion’s Imaginary
Chapter 5: Style Bloggers and the Contested Field of Fashion
Conclusion
References
Index
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful for the many colleagues and friends who have offered their support, friendship, insight and guidance as I developed this work. Much of my research was conducted during my candidature as a doctoral student in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, a department singular in its collegiality and warmth. I am especially grateful to Ian Maxwell and Amanda Card, my supervisors for this project, whose feedback on my research was invaluable and whose encouragement was utterly indispensible.
A myriad of deepest thanks also go to Chris Hay, Kath Bicknell, Kyra Clarke and Zak Millar, Lindy Ma, Bel Clough, Meg Mason, Mark Coleman, Ash Sheehan, Nick DeNeff, Jamie Davidson, Stella North, Karen De Perthuis, Prudence Black, Agnès Rocamora, Johannes Reponen, Nik Mijovic and Daniel Caulfield-Sriklad. My thanks to each of you run the gamut: from encouraging my ideas and sharing yours with me; for your friendship (and sympathy) when my writing hit a wall and for reading when my words found their feet again; for recommending books, thinkers and bloggers; for kindred conversations; and for helping me realize the look and feel of Fashademic and this book. Thank you all so very much.
I also wish to thank all the bloggers who shared their stories with me for this project – Julie Fredrickson, Rosalind Jana, Danielle Meder, Jessica Quirk, Isabel Slone, Kayla Telford-Brock and Jamie Wdziekonski – and to those who graciously gave me their permission to reproduce screenshots and images from their blog: Jane Aldridge, Laia Garcia, Brooke Kao, Ragini Nag Rao, Arabelle Sicardi, Vogue Australia and Leandra Medine and the team at Man Repeller. I am grateful, too, for the funding offered by the London College of Fashion to support the production of this book.
Finally, and most importantly, I wish to thank my parents Stuart and Sarah, and Granny Charlotte, for their constant and unconditional love and support. I couldn’t have done this work – and can’t imagine valuing reading, thinking and writing as deeply as I do – without your influence and encouragement.
Introduction
[…] where street and interior are one, historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and momentary come-ons, myriad displays of ephemera, thresholds for the passage for […] ‘the ghosts of material things’ .
—Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin in ‘Translator’s foreword’ to The Arcades Project (Benjamin 2002)
T he unfinished ‘major project of Benjamin’s mature years’ (Buck-Morss 1989: iv), The Arcades Project Passagen-Werk) consists of a vast collection of cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin’s notes on nineteenth-century Paris. It was a project in which he sought to trace the origins of modernism – namely Paris, the archetypal modern city – in the materials of the nineteenth-century, the ‘debris of mass culture’ that, for Benjamin, contained the ‘source of philosophical truth’ (1989: iv).
Benjamin’s notes were collected (and published) in convolutes , a term which Eiland and McLaughlin trace to the German Konvolut . It refers to ‘a larger or smaller assemblage […] of manuscripts or printed materials that belong together’, in English also carrying the connotation of ‘being in a convoluted form’ (Eiland and McLaughlin in Benjamin 2002: xiv). So it is with Benjamin’s work, as his expansive, itinerant ideas are compiled into dossiers around a theme – ‘Fashion’, ‘Boredom, Eternal Return’, and ‘The Seine, The Oldest Paris’, for example – in which readers find historical source material arranged next to Benjamin’s oblique notes to self, before stumbling onto excerpts of poetry by Baudelaire.
In the act of reading this work we partake in a kind of sedentary nerie as we move through the phantasmagorical city, Benjamin’s nineteenth-century Paris growing around us through his collated notes and fragments. When I first encountered The Arcades Project , I was struck by the similarity between reading the convolutes and reading personal style blogs, for reading style blogs is an uncannily similar experience. They too are comprised of fragments of text and images arranged around a theme – blogposts – that together constitute an image, albeit of a style blogger rather than an epoch, as in the case of Benjamin’s work.
Here, too, the stationary reader travels through a peopled landscape; what they encounter, however, is not the reimagined Paris of burgeoning modernism, but bloggers’ styled performances of self in a different liminal terrain, the spaces of their blogs. Here, too, as Jouhandeau observed of Benjamin’s work, the effect is to render the blogger as ‘everyone’s contemporary’ (Jouhandeau in Benjamin 2002: 66), in relation to whom the reader is positioned, by the conversational mode of address characteristic of personal blogs, as a curious, engaged passer-by.
This ambulatory mode of reading is aided by the hyperlinks that pervade such blogs: coded texts functioning as portals to other webpages that populate in a new window. On style blogs these often link to a previous post, a friend’s blog or an online store, possibilities with tangential relevance to the original post, holding it in balance with a teeming network of websites, blogs, images and ideas. In fact, until recently, it was customary for style bloggers to keep a blogroll , or a list of hyperlinked titles of blogs that they liked, in the sidebar of their own. These titles often ran together like blank verse:
july stars
white lightning
sea of ghosts
fashiontoast
hard liquor, soft holes
geometric sleep
fashion pirate
what is reality anyway?
– legends that, with a single click, would spirit the reader onto another blog written in a different voice, peopled with images of another blogger performing their personal style through outfit posts that ran down the page, back through time. For, once published, a blogpost remains anchored in its position in the reverse chronological order of a blog, while simultaneously existing in itself as a distinct cultural artefact of a blogger’s opinions and outfit, as experienced in the day in which it was composed. And so the reader is peripatetic, conducted ‘into vanished time’ (Benjamin 2002: 416), or the a-temporal continuous present of blogs, as well as intangible place, an imagined and fantastical world inhabited by a style blogger’s digitally performed self.
The style blogosphere is comprised of innumerable blogs. It thrives with informality, tangential connections, and the passions, ideas and enigmatic co-presence of bloggers and their readers. Style blogs are fantastical and everyday, public and domestic, personal and professional, each distinct and steeped in the individual aesthetic and performed selfhood of the blogger who created it. Both individually and collectively, they give rise to a new narrative about fashion and style, about the interplay between dressed self and the eye of the beholder.
Here is a beginning, then, as told through the courses charted by three early style bloggers – Susanna ‘Susie Bubble’ Lau, who started Style Bubble in March 2006, Rumi Neely, whose blog fashiontoast was first published in January 2008, and Tavi Gevinson, who created Style Rookie in March 2008. Three young women created three blogs upon which they could publish materials circulating their interest in fashion and personal style with the vaguely sensed, unqualifiable and desired ‘you’ brought into proximity by the Internet. They did this primarily by staging amateur photo shoots featuring their daily outfits, enlisting the help of willing relatives and friends to take their photographs, posing in front of a camera on self-timer or, like Susie in the beginning, contorting themselves so that the lens captured their whole reflection in the full-length mirror in their bedroom.
They wore clothes that helped them realize the look they wanted for themselves, whether that be pinning a plastic basket to a hip after being inspired by a designer’s anti-organic, structural aesthetic, or shopping eBay to find the heavy designer boots, micro-shorts and floaty tops that would become their signature. The photographs they took of these outfits slowly grew more sophisticated, as they experimented with outdoor locations, posing on a sun-drenched street, or in a wheat field, locations that had increasingly little to do with their outfit but that presented a picturesque backdrop.
These posts, flecked as they are with personal anecdotes, descriptions of ‘delicious’ clothes and opinions declaring that ‘[eBay] is truly the land where dreams come true’ (Neely, fashiontoast , 16 January 2009), demonstrate the specificity of discourse that circulates on the style blogosphere. Style bloggers don’t adopt the fashionable person’s urbane, ‘blasé-cool’ demeanour, which as Eliz