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The light is best in the early evenings, pink and soft, so Taghrid Chaaban, 21, prefers to take her photos after work. Three or four nights a week, when she has time or when she is wearing an outfit she considers especially successful, she’ll come home and coerce her 14-year-old sister into taking photos while she poses.
Sometimes she sets herself against a dusky sky, or in front of a brick wall, or along the curve of a road. The photos are artful in an Urban Outfitters catalog kind of way – Chaaban’s long brown hair catching the fading sunlight, a gauzy top floating in the wind, her sky-high stripper heels (a trademark) working in contrast with the delicate femininity of the rest of her wardrobe. Then she’ll upload the pictures to her blog, Taghrid.cc, carefully credit every item she is wearing and write text like: “I’m cheating on all my dresses with my new found love for jumpsuits.”
Chaaban has been blogging for a year, and she’s quickly found an audience. The “press” section of her site includes links to stories about her blog in Vogue Girl Korea, Teen Vogue, Nylon and WWD. She says she doesn’t follow her traffic too closely, but according to Google Analytics, her blog had 46,000 page views in May, and her posts frequently receive 50 or more comments.
“As far as styling an outfit and publishing it, I don’t think what I do is that different than what the magazines do. I am on a much lower budget, and it is more about what I want than what sells,” Chaaban says.
Tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly female style bloggers obsessively chronicle what and who they’re wearing every day. Yuri Lee, the co-founder of Lookbook.nu, a popular personal-style Web site where many style bloggers post photos and links to their blogs, says 85 percent of her users are between ages 15 and 25, 75 percent are women, and 50 percent are in the United States.
For the curious and open-minded reader, the best of these blogs are a real-life fulfillment of the promise Lucky magazine once made to its readers: that the editors would vet the wide world of shopping and help the average female sort out where to splurge and how to find great clothes on the cheap. “Vogue, Bazaar or Elle, they put together an outfit and the four pieces together total $4,000. Then they put it on a willowy anorexic 14-year-old, and the underlying message is, ‘You aren’t pretty enough, you aren’t thin enough and you aren’t rich enough,’ ” says Judy Aldridge, the 46-year-old style blogger behind Atlantis Home. “But the blogs say, ‘You can go to the thrift stores, or you can buy Christian Louboutin, and this is how you wear it.’ ”
