What She Wore: The Dialectics of Personal Style Blogging

Abstract

This research examines personal style blogging to understand the strategies women interested in personal style employ online to participate in fashion culture. In 2009 and 2010 I interviewed thirty-five personal style bloggers during two separate one-month periods about their experiences as bloggers, fashion community-members, and consumers. Bourdieu's theories of taste and social spaces, as well as Swidler's theory of strategic interaction were used to analyze the data. I found that personal style bloggers engage three strategies to navigate the social field of fashion online: opposition, conditional involvement, and buy-in. Personal style bloggers self-consciously position themselves vis-a-vis the fashion industry to respond to the pressures of consumerism and self-commodification, and illustrate that the Internet facilitates production as well as consumption of women's fashion.