Fashion bloggers: mini celebrities who have to write their own tabloids

Photograph: Voitek Pendrak

I haven’t done an outfit post in a while. Where other fashionistas have a gaga of clothes to play with, I have a small wardrobe. I’d also have to get arrested often to have someone take pictures of me. Besides, there are lots of bloggers, many under twenty, who post their style experiments regularly so I’ll leave it to the pros. On the topic of younger upstarts, before it took years to accumulate the knowledge and experience to break into many fields. Since the Internet opened access to a lot of information and people, anyone could teach themselves some subjects and connect with others doing the same.  

Fashion opened up quickly for several reasons. It’s not a steep learning curve to learn the basics. Everyone has some aesthetic sense, an opinion on what looks good and what doesn’t. Fashion’s main currency, visuals, are easy to digest so you can slog through a lot in one sitting. You don’t need many resources to get off the ground, gush about the latest trends, get creative with your outfits, etc. The Internet provides many platforms to share this interest with other enthusiasts and positive reinforcement prevents people from getting bored and moving on.

Fashion blogs gained popularity because it’s easier to relate to another fan, someone who writes without too many hard references and jargon. At first, fashion elites wrote off bloggers as amateurs threatening their turf. Then realizing they needed to adopt social media strategies to attract their next generation of customers, fashion heavyweights started using online personalities as brand ambassadors. In exchange for backstage passes, front row seats, free swag, bloggers related their experience to readers.

Though bloggers are  mostly encouraged to give honest reviews, their coverage is overwhelmingly positive. That’s not the biggest problem. After bloggers are invited  from the sidelines to the middle of the action, they can’t help but gush about what their new insider status entails. Who they’ve met, where they’ve been, etc. While there are some bloggers who have used their VIP access to plug rising stars, relay nitty gritty technical details, etc. many others have taken to chronicling their own social rise to keep the momentum going. Since most style bloggers have above average looks, maybe the industry passed them up for modelling so this is their second shot at the glam life?

Hello, goodbye

We demonize runaway consumption because it’s the need for new and more at its most obvious. But this greed pervades all aspects of life. We all always seeking new people, experiences, etc. It’s good to expand our horizons but pursuing novelty can get addictive because like taking a drug, something we never tried before is always glorious the first, second and perhaps third time. The process of getting something new feels good because during that time, the object of your desire works hard to seduce you.  After we have it for a while, we often start to enjoy it less and less, to the point we have to go after something else to feel happy again and the cycle repeats.

The mistake is believing that once you get something good, you can idly bask in the pleasure. No, it’s a continuous give and take. You have to notice how the leafs catch the light down your favourite trail. You have to notice the shy notes of a good drink tiptoeing down your tongue. That’s how you keep special moments feeling special. We are told to appreciate what we have because nothing lasts forever. That makes it seem sources of joy, from people to hobbies, disappear on their own but in many cases, we put in little effort and pushed them away.

It’s exciting to move from flower to flower, getting close enough to smell their different scents. But sometimes it’s worth choosing one to stick around, to water it, shield it from the sun and watch it grow.

Halloween

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For Halloween, I dressed up as a flower while the wind bended trees to remind me I was one season behind my life cycle. I got the organza ruffle top long ago and its a popup storybook of a chest helps me deflect human contact, others fearing they’d flatten the detail. As for the capri, whether I responded to its colors or to the tropical getaway I had one more outfit for, was one plane ticket away from, I got them despite the fact their legs were tree trunks. Though the tailor was thorough, refitting it three times to get them snug, she let the threads twist and turn as would unreeled tape. The blue cardigan I’ve incorporated into so many outfits, its fibers would have unraveled had my sweating not fused them together. The wind tried to dislodge my flowers all night or the whoosh whoosh come from me stumbling around cause I drank too much?

Drying the cleaned

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Does anyone else use uncommon methods to dry their clothes? Water turned the pleats on this shirt from knife edges to cellulite so I used paperclips to restore their shape. To prevent wrinkles from forming after washing a garment, I separate the front of it from its back a couple times so they don’t stick. Unless the shape and/or material of an item won’t hold up in water, I hand wash my clothes so the money I spend on dry cleaning isn’t enough to simply replace worn items with new ones. One downside to washing clothes yourself is, the color of some fabrics bleed when wet but not to the point water JPEG compresses their quality. There are state-of-the-art art cleaning services such as Madame Paulette who uses backlight to reveal invisible stains. They could return clothes that were used kitchen rags to their former glory. That’s where my couture gown is going if I borrowed it from someone else’s closet for a night out, spilled my drink all over it from the nervousness of wearing something so exquisite and had to prevent its owner from finding out.

Acute angles

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I’ve been eying Missoni knits for a while but most of their zigzags, as fashion and as stock market reports, did not jibe well. On top of that, some Missioni colors could’ve been repurposed as military camouflage. I got an Autumn Cashmere cardigan instead, layering it into a waterfall for this look. The outfit played many angles off each other, a crash course in trigonometry. I held everything together with a belt and appropriately enough, its buckle is of a fish. A bigger buckle would have worked better but sadly, I don’t have enough belts to be truly stylish and more than enough to be a dominatrix. Further down, tights continued the theme. They have a smell that’s so strong, the tights wouldn’t play victim to a shootout of perfume spritzes. Below, I had on a pair of studded strappy heels. This one gives you bruises that’d reassure coaches the training was tough.