Since the mid-2000s, the rise of fashion bloggers who create their own small fashion media universes has fostered a new space for the enactment and performance of fashionable identities. Fashion blogs are online fashion diaries or journals, usually run by a single person who writes about her or his views on current or past fashion trends and shares stories about her or his daily dressing habits, beauty regimes or their latest, fashionable purchases. Today, a select crowd of the most successful fashion bloggers and other ‘digital influencers’ has reached the upper echelons of the fashion industry's social hierarchy and sits in the front row of the most sought-after fashion shows in Paris, Milan, London and New York. With their self-made, self-styled microcosms, fashion bloggers challenge the division between the discourses and idealised femininities invoked by fashion media and the experiences of anonymous consumers of fashion and dress. Due to the fact that the majority of fashion bloggers are female, fashion blogs represent social spaces pertinent to feminist discourses on privacy and domesticity, identity politics and female experiences of fashion media authorship and consumption. This paper examines the narrative and performative practices set forth by the two fashion bloggers and feminist media entrepreneurs Leandra Medine and Tavi Gevinson and discusses the transformation of female authorship and self-construction within digital culture.

On fashion blogs, individual practices of self-fashioning combined with autobiographical texts and pictures (self-portraits and photographs of the bloggers) are broadcast online, where they become part of the fashion and popular culture media imagery and circulate as collective narratives. Fashion blogs can therefore be theorised as cultural spaces that revolve around routines of self-display and self-presentation mediated through fashion, dress and beauty. In his famous study The Fashion System, Roland Barthes argues that fashion ‘constructs itself (…) as a program of behaviour’ by producing idealised biographies of women who inhabit the worlds of fashion. For Barthes, fashion magazines are equal to all works of mass culture insofar as they propagate the ‘dream of identity (to be oneself, and to have this self be recognised by others)’. Fashion bloggers actualise the cultural script of fashion media by enacting and performing their own, fashionable identity created and maintained for the purpose of their blogs.