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?
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