Letter from the Editors: Analyzing Fashion Blogs—Further Avenues for Research

Researchers have engaged with fashion blogs to discuss issues such as race (Pham 2011, 2013), religion (Lewis 2013), teenage-hood (Chittendon 2010), femininity (Rocamora 2011), body size (Connell 2013), as well as global neoliberal capitalism (Luvaas 2013), whilst also engaging with wider discussions on contemporary digital practices such as hypertextuality and remediation (Rocamora 2012), new media and time (Rocamora 2013), the Internet and democratization (Pham 2011), digital entrepreneurship (Lewis 2013), the new information economy (Pham 2013), and self-digitalization (Kretz 2010). What all those studies draw attention to is the centrality of both fashion and social media to practices of the self and the formation of collective identities. Thus if, drawing on Roger Silverstone (1999), we ask “why study fashion media?” and in particular “why study fashion blogs?,” the answer will be “because they can help us better comprehend the social and the individual.” In that respect the present issue of Fashion Theory on fashion blogging must be seen not only as a contribution to the existing literature on fashion blogging, on the fashion media and on fashion more generally, but also as a contribution to social and cultural understandings of society, as befits the project of fashion studies (see Mora et al. 2014).