Since then, the idea that street style blogs are documenting real-life moments of happenstance has died, unfortunately. Nowadays, particularly in fashion weeks, attendees dress for the fashion paparazzi in a weird contrived meta haze, layering trends seen on each other’s sites to rack up internet style bingo points. Galaxy print Litas, dip-dyed pastel hair, neon Cambridge satchel? Check, check, check. Full marks for following all the trends at once. But it creates a weird postmodern pressure bubble, a twisted performance of fashion-as-game, and of course, at fashion week it takes attention away from the actual business at hand: the shows.
Plus it really just makes everything a lot harder for those of us who don’t care as much. I once tripped out of a bathroom at a Topshop show while blowing my nose, only to be blinded by the flashbulbs of twenty photographers, all taking photos of sometime It girl Leigh Lezark posing somberly in front of me. A bit awkward. There is a cozy network of street style megastars and they exist in a separate continuum from the rest of us ungainly hags.
Hopping from show to show across town, you will see the likes of Anna Dello Russo (Vogue editrix and self-described “passionate fashionista”), Alexa Chung (well-known leggy cultural moment) and Nick Wooster (retail fashion director and idol of three-piece-obsessed GQ readers) manage to do full outfit-changes to keep the cameras snapping. It’s like a real-life content farm. Wear a trendy current thing, have your photo taken, hours later it’s on a dozen sites. It’s even been said in hushed tones that some top-level bloggers are being paid huge sums to wear certain designers, so it’s not surprising that during the shows you can’t move in Somerset House but for twenty bloggers who have showed up with the sole intention of being seen there and getting their photo snapped. Like the girl I saw on Bedford Avenue, they are dressed in a uniform created by a hive-mind, a slow trickling-down of internet trends transplanted onto real-life people.
Away from fashion week, the change is felt on streets in every little city, albeit in a quieter way. Fashion historian Valerie Steele calls it the homogenisation effect, as kids in cities take their cues from kids in bigger cities, stepping closer towards a bland global uniform of cool. But what we wear on a daily basis is a reflection of our times. The clothes we wear hold a version of our social history, so what does it mean when Dubliners start dressing to fit in with internet vixens from New York or Berlin or London or Stockholm? Where does that leave us as a city attempting to forge and reforge its own aesthetic identity? Away from runways and magazines, style is constructed by the people who engage with it. Now that we choose to do this through the prism of the internet, should we be worried about losing something of ourselves on the way?
