Here’s the scenario: you work a rather corporate 9-5 job, in which, your outfit choices can only reach a certain height of creativity and personality. After work, you maniacally rush home to put on a more inspired look, grab your camera, and hit the streets to grab those fleeting moments of sun as twilight approaches. Sound like a familiar situation?
As I’ve been waxing poetic quite a bit lately regarding personal style blogging, I thought it was about time to further break down the story behind the image and think about projecting the most authentic self via personal style blogging.
Is the manner in which personal style photos are conducted really reflecting personal style, or in reality, is it a highly constructed, heightened, editorial version of it? And anyway, does it really matter?
I feel that each and every one of us has the potential to show so many different aspects of our personality in the way that we dress, which is constantly changing on a daily basis, depending on our mood, the season, and occasion we are dressing for. I once worked with a woman who described dressing for the office culture as “corporate drag,” and that she had a set of pieces that were designated for that environment, but outside of that, on the weekends and in the evenings, her style was radically different.
I think the more important question to ask here is:
Do your readers, and/or fellow bloggers care if you actually wore that particular outfit all day long, or just slipped it on for a quick 20 minute photo shoot outside?
I can’t really tell what the majority of the community thinks about this, and what the expectation of the “wear duration” of outfits that appear in personal style posts should be. I can say that despite the look being worn for the past eight hours or not, it is still is a version of you, the blogger, and that version of you, that style that is intrinsically you, is appealing to your readers. It’s easy to assign a lifestyle and tell a story that we don’t exactly live 100%, but the purpose of blogs in society certainly reaches WAY beyond being personal journals, and can be meant to galvanize the reader into trying a garment, a trend, silhouette, pattern or color mixing, etc.
It may feel strange to pull on a look merely for the purpose of taking a photo of it and presenting a well-orchestrated image but that’s essentially what all magazine editorials have been doing forever. I employed a bit of a splashy title for this piece as a conversation starter, as the definitions of what is deemed as “real” or “fake” in this world can certainly be malleable, and subject to interpretation. The bottom line with bloggers is that there’s an assumption in place that we live and breathe the images and content that we share, so the way that a personal style photo is assembled may fall under that conclusion that we are fully what we wear, all of the time.
What do you think? What do you do when taking personal style photos? (Image credit: Shutterstock.com)