It’s pretty obvious that I haven’t posted any daily style posts for quite some time, and there’s a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I got a haircut out of sheer practicality (ie, it got really hot really quickly and I cut all my hair off) and I was, er, less than enthused about the outcome. I am at heart a very practical lady (international orange underpants aside) but apparently I have my moments of vanity as well. On the upside, it’s grown out a bit and I’m feeling more positive about it.
Secondly, and more profoundly, is that I’m increasingly not sure what I bring to the (very stylish) table, metaphorically speaking. I’m not trying to fill a gap in public perception about what a type of lady is like. I generally dress in whatever’s clean and more or lessgoes together, not what will make me have a certain silhouette or emphasize a part of me. I’m not very adventurous or unusual style wise, and it’s not something I find creatively fulfilling in and of itself to any significant degree. I like making clothes, and have finally started doing that again, but I like that as much for the building process as much as the wearing process. I’ve always been at least a bit worried about the consumerism aspect of posting about my clothes, and incidentally any daily style postings I do from now on won’t list any details about where I got the garments.
When a few weeks ago, RK talked about her dilemma about fashion blogging, I found myself nodding along an awful lot (go read her whole post — it’s great). The crux of it, to me, is this:
It felt like I was doing this because…well, I wanted more compliments. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware that blogging in itself is a bit of a selfish endeavour, no matter how I spin it. But this outfit blogging felt especially selfish, with little merit to the outside world and mostly for self-gratification.
And while some self-gratification is all fine and good, I’m not sure that my desire for it outweighs all the qualms I have about it; I’m not even sure I’ve been finding it gratifying. I take pictures of myself and I look awkward, stilted, plump in some places and stretched out in others, and I don’t recognize the person I see in the mirror in the picture I’ve just taken. I trundle back and forth with the self timer and wind up half an hour later with a bunch of pictures that look nothing like what I think I look like. I’m already very conscious of how my posting pictures of myself, a white, middle class, not thin but not fat either*, lady feeds into a narrative of what constitutes beauty here, and that disconnect between what my clunky old camera sees and what I see just kills any desire I have to talk about my clothes. I’ve done quite a few sets of pictures with the intention of blogging, and my ambition just fizzles when I open the files and my heart sinks.
So I’m not sure where to go from here. I feel like I’ve written this post time and time again over the course of this blog, and I just keep going in circles and never getting anywhere. I don’t want to leave, but I’m not really participating at the moment, and that’s something I want to change. I’ve got lots of things to say about clothes, but as RK observes, those don’t get read as much:
I also noticed that my pageviews went up almost instantly when I posted an outfit photo, more so than with my words.
Maybe I don’t have the style cred to get people to read what I have to say, or maybe people aren’t interested in the first place. I don’t know, but if the ultimate point of this is self-gratification (as cringe-inducing as that is), there’s little point if the gratification part is missing.
Maybe the solution to this is to go back to doing daily style posts, but make a very concerted effort to learn how to take better photographs (or get a better camera?). Maybe it’s to try to learn how to mimic how I think I look for the camera. Maybe it’s to just chuck the daily style part of this and stick to the words, even if no-one reads them. Maybe there’s some other way around this, but I’ve been thinking about this for months and I haven’t come up with anything else. So, if you made it this far (hurray!), do you have any insights? Or photography wizardry?
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* Though I’m willing to bet there’s people who’d dispute that.
I read off my RSS feed, and I often skim the daily style posts, but you better believe I stop to read the Millie word posts.
I don’t comment much, but it does get me thinking.
Thank you! I aim to make people think.
Millie, because it sounds like you’re a little dissatisfied with what you see in your photos, let me suggest that maybe you actually need to be more habitual with the outfit shots, rather than less. What this whole year of outfit blogging has done for me has been to remove that inner flinch that I used to feel every single time I saw a photograph of myself that wasn’t perfect. For years and years my mom used to give me shit because pictures of me never turned out well — my face was always doing something inappropriate — so I was sensitive about being “not photogenic” and hated to see myself in pictures. Taking my own outfit photos has taught me to be still at appropriate times, and in a couple of candid photo situations lately, other people have even managed to take good pictures of me. It’s just a thought — maybe it won’t work for you or it’s not a priority for you — but I felt like daily photo-taking has been very beneficial to my self-image, and not because a few people give me pats for what I’m wearing in the comments.
It’s not really a priority at all to me, because dressing isn’t really a priority. I mean I get dressed every day, but it’s not an “I’m going to set aside a few minutes to consider my options” sort of dressing. I elaborated a bit below about the self-image aspect of it, but I totally hear where you’re coming from on that.
I’m nodding along with Cynthia – for me, blogging has been great for improving my self image. I’ve come to terms with what I really look like, and stopped cringing at every bad picture of myself that I happen to see. Ana over at She’s Addicted to Clothes has touched on this as well.
Just yesterday I got an official badge for a very part-time research job. All the other researchers were complaining about their photos and asking them to be taken again, and I looked at mine and went, “Cool.” It wasn’t a great photo – if fact I’m smiling so widely that it almost looks like I’m about to shout (“Yeah! I’m going to do some research!”), but I didn’t care. 1.5 years of taking those photos let me not care.
Woah woah woah, employment news! *wild applause*
Also,
I think Allison and Cynthia have a valid point – it’s true that photographing my outfits has helped me to realize more truths about my body and what really looks good on me (though admitting this reminds me of “Clueless” and Cher saying “I don’t trust mirrors, so I always take polaroids” or something similar to that, haha). So it’s been valuable in that sense.
I’m still undecided on whether I’ll continue doing outfit posts or not on my end, so I can’t offer any advice there…but just to chime in and say I DO read your “word” posts, for what it’s worth
And thanks for linking to my post. I had no idea when I wrote that conflicted prose it would generate such great and personal responses from everyone.
It’s a subject that gets to the heart of these sorts of blogs, and was very well written — I”m not at all surprised that it resonated with people as much as it did.
I read JRosel’s post too, right after I had come back from a month’s vacation from blogging. In the interim, I did have moments of standing back and looking at what has involved so much of my time in the past 9 months. I know for me that I most enjoy the conversation and community of blogging…and that doesn’t actually require photographs. I’m not much of a seamstress; perhaps step-by-step posts on your sewing projects would fit the bill.
Oh, there’s waaay more skilled seamstresses who do sew alongs and tutorials and such on their blogs, for example, Gertie’s New Blog for Better Sewing, Miss Celie’s Pants, Tanit Isis Sews, Sewaholic Patterns, and Colette Patterns. I’ve got more up my sleeve if you’re interested!
Perhaps I should clarify a bit here — ordinarily I’m fine with the pictures I take outside of outfit blogging, and my self image is correspondingly quite adequate. I’m not super photogenic, but I generally look okay and the rest of the time I’m being deliberately hammy. It really only goes south when it comes to taking blog photos — I’ve never quite figured out what to do with myself (pose awkwardly? attempt to look fashionably detached? tap dance a bit?) and somehow that translates to a terse SRS BSNS face that just looks weird, because incredible wordiness aside, I’m not an especially SRS BSNS sort of person. Throw some dodgy photography skills and an ailing camera in the mix, and you have some rather unflattering pictures.
I had an ingenious idea whilst brushing my teeth last night, which if it works should solve the problem; I’m going to test it out in the near future and see if it works as well as it did in my sleepy head.
heh…you could take outfit photos WHILE brushing your teeth! Actually, I had an awesome drawing teacher who challenged us to draw a self-portrait every night while we were brushing our teeth for a week. The pictures were hilarious and also helped us loosen up technique-wise!
This is definitely an issue that I think a lot of bloggers must reflect on- I think for me it always comes back to why I started, which was to remember all the things I loved and wanted to try out, and for a long time it was just me on the blog- the followers are just kind of a wonderful bonus where you get to communicate with non-faceless people online!
That being said, as shallow and picture hungry as I am, I always read the interrobangs ladies’ texty posts!
Every once in a while I get a little pang of “should I be doing this”? I’m not particularly skilled at dressing but I do like clothes and I would like to better match my taste with what I actually wear. For this reason I like basic outfit photos to a) keep a record of what has worked or not worked in the past. b) keep where I source my wardrobe from in the front of my mind vs the back, c) I like it as escapism and d) I do also like it as a basic very truncated update journal. I dislike using FB much and I think the blog fills a social networking void, but without including ALL of my work contacts, family members and so forth (I am too lazy to filter people and I’m of the opinion that if you don’t want *everyone* on a social networking thinger to see something, you shouldn’t post it at all).
So – FOR YOU – I don’t know. If you want to post words, I read them. I don’t always comment but I do read them. You could use creative commons photos from flickr to illustrate your points if you felt like that would be more engaging? (When I don’t have a photo relative to something, I will pull out the creative commons photos so there’s a picture. I like trolling through creative commons and picking stuff out so that’s enjoyable for me.) I think the pageviews thing has to do with the kind of folks who sign up to read outfit blogs. I have a section for them on my reader and I skim them most of the time because I’m *expecting* outfits and very little text content. When I see a post by someone who actually writes and who I like to read (you and about 15 other people out of hundreds) I will star them or open them to come back to them later to read and comment. However, if I was reading my personal writing-based blogs reader blogroll, I’d be more inclined to comment because when I opt for that reader section, I’m in the mood for text and ready to read and comment. Which do I skim more often? The pictures. I can multitask, it takes less of my time, it’s nice escapism when I need a break.
It sounds like you don’t have any strong interest in wearing clothing a certain way or cataloging anything in particular so maybe you just don’t want to post outfits? Maybe you want to post about something relative to clothing down the line? Implications of styles or manufacturing methods?
I don’t know, Millie. But I hope you stick around!