subscribe to this pageIn this article, Zamiatin explores why fashion blogs have attracted so many readers in the past few months. She attributes their growing popularity to two major factors: a sense of immediacy (blogs respond to what is happening currently, and provide updates more frequently than magazines, which are generally issued once a month) and a candid, often humorous writing style not found in fashion magazines. She briefly discusses the recent efforts among fashion bloggers, such as the editors of Coutorture, an online fashion blogging community, to bring together all fashion blogs in one place where users can find them all quickly and easily. Such a community would help democratize fashion by allowing for a multiplicity of voices and allowing readers to leave feedback.
Zamiatin comments that some of the more popular fashion blogs concern themselves with celebrity fashion, thus treading on ground traditionally covered by the mainstream fashion press. However, Zamiatin does not think that fashion blogs will eclipse traditional media such as magazines – instead, will they supplement mainstream media by providing new, current information for fans to consume and discuss.
Zamiatin’s discussion of immediacy and style as two distinguishing features of fashion blogs can be widened to describe much user-generated content created in today’s participatory internet culture: YouTube videos are known for their quick stream-times and often satiric content while web comics such as Achewood or Toothpaste for Dinner are updated daily and offer ridiculous, humorous content. A fashion blog community, such as Coutorture or ShareYourLook.com (see entry) would act as a sort of YouTube for the fashion industry, allowing the best blogs to rise to the top and gain the most pageviews, thus placing fashion even further into the hands of the masses.
Zamiatin is probably correct in arguing that blogs will not displace traditional fashion reporting, but she misses one of the more obvious reasons why this is so: the advantage of an actual (as opposed to virtual) magazine is that you can roll it up, toss it into a backpack and read it in the park or on the beach. While Sidekicks and other devices that allow users to access their email remotely are growing more and more popular, there is something about curling up with a magazine that can not be replicated with a tiny Sidekick screen.
Furthermore, while Zamiatin argues that fashion blogs democratize fashion culture, one could also argue that by focusing on celebrities, many blogs actually reinforce the cultural distance between celebrities and the greater reading public. Instead, it seems more likely that street style blogs, who random stylish strangers, have the potential to democratize fashion by portraying it as something exemplified by ordinary people.
The Hot or Not of the fashion blogosphere, ShareYourLook allows users to upload photos of themselves in their favorite outfits and then asks other users to rate their style on a scale of 1 to 5. The site also contains a slew of web 2.0 features that savvy Internet users have undoubtedly become accustomed with – users can email photos, comment on them, tag them or filter them based on style or price. In addition, each user has a homepage, which includes recent fashion photos and personal information. Fun features, such as “The Wall” will randomly generate 20 photos posted on the site, and a “News” page contains links to a variety of blogs sorted into categories: fashion, shopping, celebrities, beauty.
ShareYourLook is an important development for the online fashion community because it allows anyone with a camera and an internet connection to partake in the creating and judging of fashion trends. While street style blogs capture ordinary fashionable people, ShareYourLook contains photos from people across the globe, many of whom may live in areas where fashion bloggers never venture or whose simple styles are unlikely to catch the eye of bloggers seeking unusual, cutting-edge trends. ShareYourLook is unique in that it features ordinary everyday looks alongside more cutting edge looks, and asks users to comment on both. While many of the top-rated looks feature trendy, “high style” items, common items are highly ranked as well, such as skinny jeans and black rain boots. By placing new and unusual items alongside already popular favorites, ShareYourLook’s top-rated looks represent a more accurate compilation of what fashion fans actually find stylish, drawn from a larger pool of varying styles. Like YouTube, the top rated looks on ShareYourLook are those that have received high ratings from multiple users; thus, like YouTube, ShareYourLook provides the tools for a truly democratic fashion culture.
Yet while ShareYourLook provides the tools for fashion democratization, as of now, it does not have enough users to truly represent anything other than the opinions of site-users. While the main page boasts that the site has users in 54 countries, numbers still seem low: the most-viewed look only has 1398 views, as of 11:10 p.m. on March 7, 2007, compared to the top video on YouTube, which has 43,546,227 views as of the same time. Technorati only lists three incoming links to the site, making it relatively insubstantial in the current world of fashion blogging. Even so, ShareYourLook could be the future of fashion blogging – thus democratizing the tools of culture even more.