Fashion blogging – fantasy vs. reality

Let’s make one thing clear before I begin this here article; I LOVE the shiny, the expensive and the beautiful. Genuinely love it, to the extent where I dedicate a large portion of my spare time researching it, and filtering it, and twisting it to suit my sordid, petite-based blogging needs. I write Diary of a Small Girl – a sporadically updated, style-oriented ‘blog’ (origins: weblog: online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a web page) mainly focusing on the frivolous and the trivial, with a substantial dash of the personal and the thoughtful.

In this age of cut-backs and riots and bankers being bankers, everyone needs a bit of escapism; a temporary lift out of the mundane, into an instagrammed world where people are hot, money’s no object and life-advice fits neatly over an inspiring sunset image. But – and this is a big but – we’re also a frustrated generation, bored of being sold to, and manipulated, and told how we should look and behave by behemoth organisations with cash on their mind and morals in the gutter. We love fashion and glamour and sparkle – but we also want truth and genuine opinions. Basically, we are a very complex and confused bunch of people, seeking reality in the fantasy world of fashion.

The personal fashion blog – generally an online diary of someone’s day-to-day attire – seems to be the most popular means of creating this blend of make-believe and authenticity. Sure, they only show one of many angles which make up someone’s life, but the fact that they’re not airbrushed to oblivion and shot with a brand-peddling scheme in mind, makes them aspirational, but most importantly, makes them – at least, seem – accessible. The Man Repeller, for instance, blogs about her ridiculously lavish, designer-clad wardrobe, but her give-a-shit attitude and face-pulling-while-wearing-valentino pictures make you feel as if that could be you – that you could be that ridiculous but fabulous girl.

These balanced and beautiful blogs are where it’s at these days; they’re the engaging, character-filled antidote we need to the world of bullshit which the traditional media can be. It’s the extreme ends of the blogging spectrum however, which have me twitching in my seat and frothing at the mouse. I am bored to tears with coming across blogs detailing the gym-goingly, teeth-brushingly, boy-stalkingly mundane of someone’s existence; I have Facebook for that. On the other end, we have the ad-laden glossy blogs of models and socialites with little to say but budgets of thousands; I have Vogue for that. Even Street Style blogs these days seem staged and modelly and polished; where’s that going to leave the average girl’s self-esteem?

I do love style blogs – they raise some very interesting questions about the way in which we present ourselves to the world and the way power is, at least marginally, shifting from the corporations to the people they sell to. Most importantly though, they feed my need for beautiful things and outrageous people; they make my life more colourful and eclectic, if only at lunch-times and in the day’s rare spare moments. I get all riled up about the blogging extremes, but you can’t really bash something which is an amazing source of inspiration and creative outlet for hundreds of thousands of people (although please, exercise some restraint on those toilet tales, I’m eating…).