At one remove from reality: Style bloggers and outfit posts

In recent years, the outfit post - a defining feature of personal style blogs - has changed the seeing and being seen of dressing. What was once primarily a corporeal and temporal social practice has developed into a performed virtual reality in which style bloggers literally fashion their identity on their blogs. Style blogs thus become both the space in which bloggers realize their own fashioned self and the site at which their readers experience them as stylish. These blogs have become a place for the display of the new and a realization of the imaginary, as well as a site to record 'what I wore'. This article explores the phenomenon of outfit posts, focusing on the interanimation therein between bloggers' styled selves and their clothing. Central to this discussion will be a consideration of the ways that outfit posts are both performative and expressive presentations of self.