Here’s a thought: individual Internet browsing history is today’s unintentional diary of selfhood. It’s intimate, it’s true, and it’s often embarrassing. More importantly, if digested as a whole, it creates a detailed and accurate picture of who you are—your interests, your questions, your wants and needs. It’s pretty much all there. I think this is particularly true for members of my generation who have grown up spending copious amounts of one-on-one time with our laptops. (Did you name your first one? Oh man, I did.)
If you spent some time sifting through this information on my laptop, you would discover that I recently looked up where to get my eyebrows waxed in London and how to make scrambled eggs in a mug. You’d also find out how many times I revisited the YouTube video of Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” remixed with the sound of a bleating goat.
But you would also see just how many blogs and blog-like websites I read DAILY or maybe even HOURLY (hello, refresh button). I would list them all right here and right now, but that would be a waste of space because you’re probably more curious about the Google searches I’m not telling you about, right? No dice.
Anyways, I read a lot of blogs. Most of them focus on fashion, like Shine by Three and park & cube and 5 inch and up. Others, like The Cut and Refinery 29 (which aren’t technically blogs, but definitely qualify as “blog-like”), focus on general women-y topics of interest. Hai ladiez.
A very special but miniscule number of the blogs I read feature some pretty flipping brilliant writers. When it's done well, I think the most interesting kind of writing is the personal essay-- there's nothing quite like digesting the human experience from an “I” perspective. xoJaneis a fantastic resource for this kind of writing, as are Rookie Mag and Hello Giggles. Truth, vulnerability, originality, and humor seem to be the magic combination for producing personal writing that people want to read and keep reading. These sites nail all four qualities. (Incidentally, Lena Dunham's show Girls is a TV manifestation of what I'm talking about.)
But most of all, out of everything available for consumption on the world wide web, I like to read personal essays related to fashion and style. Combine fashion with great writing and a great story, and I’m hooked.
While I obviously enjoy the typical online fashion-centric offerings-- slideshows of “What to Wear This Summer!” and write-ups about the latest designer collaboration-- there’s something about reading an experiential fashion piece in the first person that really gets my attention. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the fact that the vulnerable human experience and fashion are, in many ways, inseparable. Fashion is full of mistakes and aspirations, choices and expressions of identity, doubt, weirdness, and surprise. Just like, ya know, LIFE. They go hand in hand in my book.
Basically, I’m not so interested in what a celebrity wore to the Oscars as I am in what you wore on your first day of high school and why. I don’t want to read another online article about the next “It” shoe—I want to read about the time you saved up for months to buy a pair of green suede pumps that subsequently changed your life. Or the time your mom tried to make you wear her old prom dress. Or the time you conducted an experiment by wearing denim overalls to a nightclub. You feel me?
The only problem is that good examples of this particular genre of fashion writing are few and far between. Leandra Medine’s blog The Man Repeller is an exception-- the rare fashion blog that is more than just aesthetically pleasing photo shoots of a pretty girl in designer clothing. Maybe I simply haven’t found something else out there quite like it, but right now The Man Repeller seems to be the only online source of writing that fuses identity and fashion so eloquently, so truthfully, and so humorously on a regular basis. I’ve seen glimpses of it in other places on the Internet-- occasional slices of Yes! This is what I’m talking about!--but The Man Repeller is both consistent and prolific. I was psyched when Medine started featuring contributions from writer Mattie Kahn on the blog as well, perhaps giving us a glimpse of her future plans for the Man Repeller as a multi-contributor destination website. I’m keeping my fingers and eyes crossed.
Anyways, to get to the point, I'm trying define to what I want to be reading, because what I want to be reading is also what I want to be writing.
Fourteen months from now, I’ll graduate from college with, hopefully, a semi-cooked brain and some kind of a plan. As of now, I want that plan to include writing about fashion in my own voice and based on my own experiences. Whether I’m good enough to get paid for that kind of work and make a career out of it is another question entirely.
I'd love to know YOUR thoughts (if you got to the end of this post, congrats, I'm naming my firstborn after you). What do you want to read online? Are your daily Internet browsings indicative of who you are? What you want to do? Be? Tell me tell me.