Manoeuvring visuality: The fashion blogs as genre

Fashion as a phenomenon cannot be understood independently of the visual images and designed presentations that convey its content and forms. With the breakthrough of digital media in the 2000s we were introduced to new ways of communicating and staging fashion. The blog in particular established a new media culture for the distribution and exchange of fashion, based on acute forms of visual self-presentation. The observed research subject of this article is the fashion blogger phenomenon between 2007 and 2016. In this period, the application of images to represent – and not least present – new approaches to fashion has played an increasing role. It is not altogether wrong to argue that the fashion blog is made present by images more than by tangible design and the visual presentation becomes an important ingredient in a further cultural fashionscape, which contributes to the current popularity of fashion beyond the traditional fashion elite. This chapter presents four genres of fashion blog which traverse different forms of visualization and thus present different forms of transvisuality, involving and entangling fashion with new forms of branding, new identity formats, new cultural experiences and new ways to practise fashion.