Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-portraits

Abstract

Since their appearance at the beginning of the millennium, fashion blogs have become key players in the field of fashion. One type in particular, personal fashion blogs, where bloggers post pictures of themselves documenting their style, has established itself as a central form of fashion blogging. This is the type of blogs that this article concentrates on. By bringing together various technologies of the self it argues that the blogs represent a significant space of identity construction. Focusing on the idea of gender, it explores the various forces, both empowering and disempowering, at play in the formation and representation of femininity. The computer screen is discussed as a mirror through which women's position as specular objects is both reproduced and challenged, whilst the blogs also constitute a space for the circulation of alternative visions of femininity.