Why I Blog

The first time I picked up Cosmopolitan, I was about ten years old. In one sitting I eagerly devoured the whole thing, cover to cover. From that moment, and throughout my early teens, I was a prolific devourer of women’s magazines. I loved the glossy pictures of beautiful things and I loved the stories about grown, professional women. By reading these magazines, I thought I was learning what it was like to be a woman.

But as I got older these halcyon-coloured tomes could no longer entertain and inform me as they once had.

Part of this was that I grew up. As a teen, my scrutiny of the articles was obviously limited. As an anthropology undergrad, I couldn’t read articles about how ‘marriage is this’ or ‘families are that’ without dying a little inside. The certainty with which the articles declared things to be a particular way infuriated me, glossing over the diversity and marginalising the dissonance.

But I don’t think it was just me that changed. I genuinely feel like women’s magazines got worse: vapid and patronising. I don’t care about the ‘cute boy at the gym’ because I’m a grown woman and I want a man, not a boy.  Or perhaps, in a radical detour from conventional thought, I’m not thinking about the opposite sex at all while at the gym (I am almost certainly just trying not to fall off the treadmill). I also don’t care whether animal print is ‘totes amaze’ or wedges are ‘defo on trend’; this kind of vocabulary should be reserved for the text conversations of 13-year-olds rather than printed in magazines supposedly aimed at adults. It’s like the magazines no longer respect, or even particularly like, the women for whom they are purportedly writing.

Into my twenties, the one magazine I still regularly flicked through was Vogue. I persevered with Vogue primarily because it remains more narrowly focused on fashion compared to other magazines, avoiding the almost invariably awful token discussions of ‘women’s interest’ issues. But then, in a recent edition, I came across ‘trad’ being used as an abbreviation for ‘traditional’ when discussing tailored jackets. Something inside me snapped.

I decided that I wanted to create a blog to showcase fashion without being patronising. I wanted to cover a range of topics, recognising that women can like fashion and maintain a genuine interest in a range of issues, in language that didn’t treat readers like children or gloss over complexities. From fashion to feminism, food to photography, I wanted to use this space to share things that I found interesting, challenging or just plain beautiful.

Obviously this blog is new and it’ll take some time for it to resemble what I have in mind. Right now the blog will focus on street style and articles on various topics. Eventually I want to cover runway shows and specific collections.

And so I ask you to be patient and enjoy.

Best wishes,

Nel