The light is best in the early evenings, pink and soft, so Taghrid Chaaban, 21, prefers to take her photos after work. Three or four nights a week, when she has time or when she is wearing an outfit she considers especially successful, she’ll come home and coerce her 14-year-old sister into playing photographer while she poses.
Sometimes she sets herself against a dusky sky, or in front of a brick wall, or along the curve of a road. The photos are artful in an Urban Outfitters catalog kind of way — Chaaban’s long brown hair catching the fading sunlight, a gauzy top floating in the wind, her sky-high stripper heels (a trademark) working in contrast with the delicate femininity of the rest of her wardrobe. Then she’ll upload the pictures to her blog, Taghrid.cc, carefully credit every item she is wearing and write text like: “I’m cheating on all my dresses with my new found love for jumpsuits.”
Chaaban has been blogging for a year, and she’s quickly found an appreciative audience. The “press” section of her site includes links to stories about her blog in Vogue Girl Korea, Teen Vogue, Nylon and WWD. She says she doesn’t follow her traffic too closely, but according to Google Analytics, her blog received 46,000 page views in May, and her posts frequently receive 50-plus comments.
“As far as styling an outfit and publishing it, I don’t think what I do is that different than what the magazines do. I am on a much lower budget, and it is more about what I want than what sells,” Chaaban says, speaking from her home in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. “We are all inspired by the magazines and those super-hot models, but we kind of turn it and make it our own.” The “we” Chaaban refers to are the tens of thousands of (mostly) young, (mostly) female style bloggers who obsessively chronicle what and who they’re wearing every day.
Yuri Lee, the co-founder of Lookbook .nu, a popular personal-style website where many style bloggers post photos and links to their blogs, says 85 percent of her users are between ages 15 and 25, 75 percent are women, and 50 percent are in the United States. Still, this is a global community with contributions from Poland, Argentina, France, Australia and just about everywhere else young people care about clothes.
Their posts almost always catalog each item of clothing they’re wearing and where it was purchased — usually an affordable mix of H&M, Forever 21, American Apparel and “thrifted” pieces, plus an occasional designer accessory.
For the curious and open-minded reader, the best of these blogs are a real-life fulfillment of the promise Lucky magazine once made to its readers: that the editors would vet the wide world of shopping and help the average female sort out where to splurge and how to find great clothes on the cheap. “Vogue, Bazaar or Elle, they put together an outfit and the four pieces together total $4,000. Then they put it on a willowy anorexic 14-year- old, and the underlying message is, ‘You aren’t pretty enough, you aren’t thin enough and you aren’t rich enough,’ ” says Judy Aldridge, the 46-year-old style blogger behind Atlantis Home. “But the blogs say, ‘You can go to the thrift stores, or you can buy Christian Louboutin, and this is how you wear it.’ ”
The issue of vanity informing 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, says that is something she has thought about since starting 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. “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.”
But Agnes Rocamora, a senior research fellow and senior lecturer of cultural and historical studies at the London College of Fashion who is researching fashion blogs, thinks it’s too easy to dismiss these websites as self-serving. “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.”
Selected blogs
taghrid.cc
lookbook.nu
