Blogging isn't new.
These user-friendly, diary-like Web sites have been around so long that it's likely your grandma has heard the term. In fact, it is entirely possible she has already created one to wax poetic about retired life and post embarrassing photos from your youth, calling you from Key West, Fla. to demand you comment on her review of last night's "American Idol."
Blogging, it seems, is a media form that is here to stay, offering a condensed, easy-to-follow timeline of news stories or celebrity gossip or complete strangers' outfits.
Somewhere in the perfect storm of cheap digital cameras, free time and narcissism, the first fashion blog was created. Since then I've wasted ridiculous amounts of time putting off my humanities essay to scroll through posts of people simply showing what they wore on a particular day. Which is, if I stop to think about it, kind of creepy.
Instead of seeing an actress in a movie or spotting someone in Muddy Waters with a cool jacket, we get access to hundreds of people with cool jackets and enough free time to post about 24 hours a day.
A few of these girls have even reached a weird state of semi-notoriety, which I've mostly heard about by reading other blogs. There's Jane Aldridge of popular blog "Sea of Shoes," a 16-year-old who started taking pictures of her mother's insane designer wardrobe and now has a spinoff line of footwear at Urban Outfitters under her belt.
Another blogger with an intense amount of media coverage is Tavi Gevinson, a 13-year-old who took pictures of herself wearing generally unflattering layers day after day for a few years before getting invited to New York Fashion Week and being put on the cover of Pop Magazine. I'd shake my head and say, "Kids these days." But I'm probably jealous: girl got to sit near Anna Wintour, and I'm sitting in Geneseo writing about her.
Fashion blogging is a weird bubble of the Internet in which assembling one's outward appearance becomes priority. I've always been vaguely interested in putting effort into an outfit, and fashion blogs let that vague interest become a fixation until I believe my life can't be all that fulfilled until I get floral-print leggings from the nearest Forever 21.
It's fun to entertain thoughts that unabashed fabulousness, like most of these bloggers seem to have a handle on, can be found in an exciting headband or a flowy skirt.