We tend to believe that the genesis of fashion blogging happened some time around 2008, approximately when the mainstream fashion media started picking up on these personal websites which purportedly discussed fashion from unique, outsider perspectives. But there’s always another story to be told, especially of the many women and girls who created and demolished their own personal style blogs before Anna Wintour even knew who Bryanboy was.
In 2006, before stylish girls and boys logged on to LOOKBOOK.nu or Chictopia to share their looks, there was a single prototype called MyStyleDiary where girls including Susie Lau, now of Style Bubble, took pictures of their outfits in the mirror. These early bloggers covered their faces with the camera and contorted their bodies in order to capture their entire outfits in the mirror, including the shoes. Now, outfit photos are so perfect that bloggers look like they hire professional photographers to get the job done.
The flickr group wardrobe_remix was also huge. The group showcased an incredible variety of personal styles because everyone uploaded photos of themselves and built a grassroots style community from the ground up. Some girls had defined styles, like vintage pin-up girls, but most of them just bought whatever they liked from the thrift store, just trying to figure their own style out. Two of the most memorable contributors were “bobonia,” a cute girl from the Philippines who wore bright colours and “piksi,” a girl who was very Scandinavian and very blonde with a proclivity for polka dots. The two looked absolutely nothing alike. Now ‘blogger style’ is a trend in its own right, typified by a mashup of every trend story possible. Being a “blogger” is about looking “high maintenance, blatant and unashamedly fashion mad.”
There was even an early social networking website for fashion folk called IQONS*, whose fashionable misspelling came long before FASHN WK was ever a thing. The interface was all black, which I think was supposed to be glamorous, but mostly just hurt my eyes. Now we have LinkedIn for connecting with people in a professional, albeit not industry-specific, context.
There were also fashion bloggers who enjoyed a decent amount of success for the size of the community. None were blogging as a full-time job, but they were the girls I looked up to, the proverbial Edie Sedgwicks of the fashion blogging Factory.
Art Geek and Fashion Freak was run by Lala, a super cute Chinese girl from California who was obsessed with Harry Potter. She was incredibly crafty and sewed a lot of her own clothes, including a stuffed lobster headband, or else bought them at the thrift store for ridiculously cheap. She always found weird tent dresses for like, $0.98, and altered them to create her dream shirt or pants. Her wardrobe was vibrant and colourful and she seemed to never wear the same outfit twice. She was also the first blogger I remember wearing Doc Martens– clearly a trailblazer in her own right.
Ashley lived in Las Vegas and wrote a funky blog called Soul Tanggg. Everybody who wrote about fashion on the internet loved thrifting, but Ashley was a bona fide thrift goddess. She consistently found insane designer items at Savers for ridiculously cheap. It was logomania on a dime– she had Dior sweaters, Pucci scarves, vintage Gucci purses, and much more. To this day I’m convinced that Las Vegas is the thrift capital of America just by the sheer volume of designer items she managed to uncover. Those were the golden days of thrifting. Her style was very maximalist, mixing crazy-patterned grandpa sweaters with coloured tights, a ton of jewelry, and really large-framed glasses.
Lauren of Fops and Dandies shut down her blog when she moved to Chicago to pursue a law degree, but before that she was a New York City girl who wore everything but the kitchen sink. She could dress up in an outfit consisting entirely of different granny floral patterns with pink Converse sneakers and look unique, not like an Urban Outfitters catalog. Lauren, or ‘LC’ as she was known, was one of the first bloggers to create visual mood boards by photoshopping her outfit pictures onto backgrounds that inspired the outfit. In 2009, we got a rare taste of her post-blog life, which featured additional outfit pictures and a peek into her very covetable (and very large) wardrobe.
Moderniteter was ran by two Swedish teenaged sisters who had perfect blonde hair. They mostly wore skirts, tights, and vintage ankle boots with chunky knit scarves because it’s presumably very cold in Sweden, and important to bundle up the layers. Their long hair was swept up in no-nonsense top knots, with messy fly-away bits. It was kind of hard to tell what the sisters were all about because their blog was mostly written in Swedish, but they undoubtedly pioneered the effortless Scandinavian style now seen on Hel-looks and Stockholm Street Style.
Lastly I have to give a local shout-out to Toronto-native, The Iron Chic. Only a quirky girl would name her blog after pro-wrestler The Iron Sheik, and she had the outfits to back it up. She always wore cheeky secondhand novelty shirts, like California Raisins and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Plus, she had a Keds lace-up sneaker collection that would put anyone to shame. Now she runs Symbolist Furniture and Art Objects, located at 1080 Queen St. W., near Dovercourt.
Even then, the world of fashion blogging was a deep sea compared to the Marianas Trench it is now, and there were a number of inspiring women I neglected to mention. If any of you live to blog again, you know I’ll be reading…
____
Isabel Slone is a Toronto-based fashion blogger and writer. Follow her on Twitter at @isabelslone.
For more, follow us on Twitter at @TorontoStandard, or subscribe to our newsletter.
