This attempt of Venn diagram shows how ridiculous fashion blogging has gotten: there’s no fashion and no blogging

You love them too, don’t even try to deny it: those long legs, big sunglasses and brand name purses. The quintessence of fashion in five photos. Be honest with yourself: how often do you check your little favorite skinny girl’s blog? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day?

The entire blogging movement was once a revolutionary and valuable source of information and creativity. Truly independent minds would speak out with no constraints or editorial/political pressures, unlike “traditional” media.

But something changed it all, destroying forever any objectivity or independence in the blogosphere: the monster/god of affiliate marketing.

Many fashion bloggers are getting paid to wear garments they don’t even like and even worse, the fashion blog standard has become a showcase of overpriced crap nobody should be buying. Ever. What is the art in bringing fashion to the masses if you are wearing the most expensive brands on the planet? Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Chanel, Celine, Goyard, Dior, Valentino are only some examples of staples for some of the most famous fashion bloggers nowadays. Spending $4,500 on a purse is simply not reasonable for the average American, with an annual income of $50,000 this little treat represents 9% of your annual earnings… I could exemplify the opportunity cost of buying such an item with many examples, but I think that’s understood by saying: $4,500!!!

The worst is that those elite bloggers are influencing their followers and smaller bloggers into thinking that’s what fashion means; wearing whatever bloggers are wearing, following the latest trends and spending the equivalent of a mortgage payment in California on a tiny purse.

As if fashion magazines weren’t sufficiently insulting already, now we have all these “independent” forces doing exactly the same thing that we despise magazines for: sell us stuff. The danger of this (and the beauty, for marketers) is that most consumers are not aware of how the system works. And this extends to affiliate marketing in general, but people seem particularly oblivious when it comes to these women, who are admired for their “style” and “beauty” but also considered an authority when it comes to fashion for taking pictures of themselves in various exotic locations.

Go on Instagram and you will understand the extent of what I mean: hundreds of people wearing the same clothes, taking the same kinds of pictures, even visiting the same destinations, all under the label of “fashion blogger”, as if it was a matter of pride and honor to put so much effort into something as trivial as clothes. Not even fashion designers do that: they wear the same thing all the time… #smart

Unfortunately, those who have made a business of their blogs caught the wave at the right time. Now, the market is very saturated and it will be very hard for newcomers to achieve a comparable level of success than people who started 5 or 7 years ago.

I don’t think blogging about fashion and wearing slutty clothes is the problem. There are some very smart people behind some of these blogs that have skills in many areas like marketing, photography and web design. But most don’t, and even the ones that do are a simple shell of a human to the public: the length of fashion posts has pretty much shrieked to a couple lines of links to the products in question and these people’s personalities depend more on how they look like.

You can wear all the expensive bs you want, but please show me you are a thinking woman and that you know about any topic other than color coordination. And be honest: state when you are getting royalties or receiving any type of benefit from wearing certain clothes and mentioning brands on your blog.

I will not mention examples of this because I simply do not want to bring more attention and increase the already undeserved high number of links to any of these people.

There are many others out there that feel something similar about this topic and here you can read more about it:

Fashion bloggers, why? Is a hilarious take on some of the inconsistencies tome popular bloggers delight us with every once in a while. With an extremely sarcastic tone and good old fashioned black humor, this blog makes me laugh every time.

A great note on how rotten fashion blogging is. With excellent references and insider information.

Gretchen tells us in a very honest way why she stopped reading fashion blogs altogether.

This is a post from a confused person that envies popular fashion bloggers, a little depressing, but she has some good ideas.