The other day I thought to myself, "That guy's outfit is so Tumblr." A strange sentiment on the surface, but as I got to thinking about personal style and the internet it occurred to me that the symbiosis between online style stars and the omnipresent photographers that celebrate them has created a chicken and egg situation with far-reaching repercussions. Are these people popular because they're photographed so much, or are they photographed so much because they're popular? More than that, what does their popularity mean for the sizable audience digesting their de facto style creeds on a million different dashboards?
Image-based platforms for social interaction have inevitably wound up as tools for sociocultural coding, providing a visual demarcation of who gets It and who's from Florida. You can see it in Pinterest's evolution beyond its humble beginnings as an online scrapbook and content-bookmarking service; the site now serves as a portal into a world of rough-luxe Scandinavian cabins, artisanal fig tartines and fireplace-adjacent thoroughbred labradors. The same can be said of Tumblr, with its users' adherence to an aesthetic equation that drives the popularity of most images on the blogging platform. Conformity can come as no surprise - what else could be the end result of 10,000 reblogs? Is Tumblr more of a collective digestive system than anything else?
Click through to continue reading this post!
Jian DeLeon discusses this phenomenon at length in a recent Complex.com post titled, "Why Tumblr Is Killing Personal Style". DeLeon argues that, "The cursory way social platforms like Tumblr—and the Internet at large—present style is within a vacuum. Clothing simply can't be compelling unless it stands for something else...Tumblr, and the Internet version of style it champions, is detrimental because it presents dressing well as a talent in and of itself." But can we blame Tumblr for the fact that dressing well - or, rather, dressing well according to certain guidelines - is something that does have its own rewards system? Of course people will consider it a talent in and of itself when recent years have seen style bloggers granted more and more privileges for simply wearing clothes, the term "styling" thrown around so loosely it's lost almost all relevance in describing a specified skill set.
Add to that the fact that personal style blogging has become less about an individual's viewpoint and more about feeding into the unified aesthetics of the platform distributing a blogger's content - Tumblr, for instance - to an audience that already knows what it wants and more than that, already knows what it wants to look like. DeLeon goes on to lament that, "the Tumblr platform—combined with the circle-jerk heavy world of #menswear birthed within it—has changed the culture of men's clothing for the worse," and declares the fashion icons of today, many of whom we know solely in the context of street style and blog photography, doomed to become, "ephemeral memes," with no, "profound cultural impact." It would seem that if video killed the radio star, Tumblr has killed the fashion icon and left in his stead a pastiche of fickle trendsetters. Balenciaga sweatshirts? Supreme snapbacks? Studded Louboutin loafers? Any/all Givenchy tees? Tumblr sometimes reads like one giant, "Who Wore It Better?" feature, skewed to a transcontinental fashion audience.
All this being said, it's not like Tumblr, or any social media platform, actively prohibits the development of other stylistic outputs or points of view. Granted, blogging has arguably devolved into an imaginative wasteland, with ten half-assed, "personal style bloggers" cropping up for every quarter of original thought expressed. But the internet is pretty f*cking gigantic. No one is forcing you to follow blogs that promote or encourage sameness. If you're looking for a Tumblr with a flashing Rainbow Brite gif as the background, a penis where your cursor should be and an endless stream of neo-90's rave-goth chic juxtaposed with David Lynch screencaps and anime porn, it's out there for you!
At the heart of the matter, I'm not so sure that the men being swayed by "Tumblr style" have a personal viewpoint to begin with, at least when it comes to getting dressed. I don't necessarily love the brah-tastic world of #menswear, but if it means I get to look at fewer Ed Hardy tees, so be it. Speaking of which, do they have Tumblr in New Jersey?
