Return of the Blog...?

[Nvrwstd]

Does anyone else find themselves yearning to open up their bookmarks and click through the 50+ blogs they had pinned? Not only fashion related, but maybe there was a street photographer you used to follow, or a poet, or an at-home chef.

Remember being a blogger yourself? (Pre bloggers getting invited to fashion shows and sponsorships.) You had a tight-knit community and didn't care about how many likes something had - you just wanted to create content true to YOU! Not what the algorithm pushed you to make for "engagement."

Do we think that because we're being driven to sell, sell, sell or buy, buy, buy - soon it will pop? And the cycle will revert back? If so WHEN! Because I'm patiently waiting... Maybe I'm getting excited because I see this hipster/indie sleaze revival, and that's when I was into blogging.

 

[penny609]

Interesting topic! I used to be a blogger myself in the mid to late 00's and early 10's and that was a fantastic experience. We were two on board and started it by chance before things became more "serious". Yes, we had invitations to fashion shows and got to meet model agents among other treats. Quite the journey if I may say as it took us to Berlin, Riga, NYC etc.

I personally would love a return of the well-written blog under a new form that has still to be invented yet. Today it's all about pictures (often cheap and unnecessary ones) and wording is getting poorer and poorer by the day. But I'm not worried about some changes to happen later... or soon. One day or another, people will feel the need for more elaborated contents, or analysis regardless if the places to find such stuff remain niche or almost confidential.

To be true, when we started we had no particular target in mind and just did what we liked (writing it in a cybercafé back then). The point was to find the right topic, the right imagery and have fun with the texts and thank to this, people started to watch and read. We enjoyed what we were creating and in return our readers enjoyed our contents too. No plan was the best plan unlike today's very mercantile approach. Passion, honesty, knowledge were the keywords and even if I use past tenses to talk about it, I'm pretty sure there remain some people craving for that.

Now the questions are when and how. It may took some extra time before we see something of this kind but I could foresee this happening again in a new, updated formula.

 

[OriginalYou]

Blogging is still a thing. Maybe not as much as it used to be and usually these days it's in the form of "10 reasons I blah my blah" or "5 ways you blah your blah" but it's there. In all honesty, I blame instagram and social media in general.

 

[Drusilla_]

I miss blogs (and had one of my own too), it's a bit sad to remember the mid-later 00s which is the heyday of fashion blogging, before the invention of the fb like button, and see it replaced by influencer culture and effectively become just another marketing tool for fashion. Some of the OGs are now walking around beholden to brands and afraid to say a critical word, and the gutting of the print media means that they effectively have to keep doing it because they have no room to be involved in the industry otherwise.

I get WHY it turned out this way - blogs can be time-consuming to write or photograph for, especially the longform writing kind, and people just seem to expect 'perfection' in all "content". It isn't possible to keep that up forever if you don't have a source of income, but I do think we lost something when the switch to ig happened, and I'm grateful to everyone on my blogroll who left their blogs up and didn't delete or go private. There's a level of frankness and a lack of hostility to other people that even the vaunted t*kt*k can't match.