Fashion: Blogs and Stuff

I've been reading fashion blogs. My reading started, characteristically for me, with a controversial article. From a year ago. (I didn't claim to be timely.) On a site called IFB, or Independent Fashion Bloggers. As far as I can make out, the seed of said controversy is the fact that fashion bloggers who can be identified as "white, slim and pretty" tend to be more successful than those who don't fulfill all three of these descriptions. The article was interpreted as saying that this was because the fashion bloggers who didn't fulfill the magic criteria had lower quality content, and that they should step up and improve.

Kaboom.

This resulted in a fascinating stream of comments, and responses on lots of blogs. I seem to have already chosen sides in this year-old conflict, because rather than linking to the original article, I'm linking to one of those responses, "IFB: When Good Sites Go Bad". It links to the original article and to other responses.

I'm enjoying the discussion. And the debate. And the blogs. What some apparently refer to as IFB-gate appears to be my gateway into the online fashion world. Lots of blogs with fashion'y photos of people that look like someone I could see out in the real world. Most of them even look like they eat food.

I'm still struggling to actually comprehend the clothes. It's a different culture from perfume blogs. And I'm trying to get used to information conveyed by photograph rather than primarily by the written word.  I seem to be in the position of a perfume-blog-reader who not only doesn't know what a chypre is, but doesn't know what they don't know, because the references to chypres, or oakmoss, or heart notes, are in photographic form.

But it's entertaining.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.