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The girl in the Bubble
Sunday, March 29, 2009 By Gillian Nelis
A couple of years back, Susie Lau was at home in London and feeling a little bored.

With nothing better to do, she began putting her thoughts on personal style onto a blog, which she called Style Bubble. Over the next while, she regularly updated it with details of her favourite outfits, her thoughts on designers’ new collections, and the shops she liked to visit.

Two years on, Style Bubble is visited by 10,000 people a day, and Lau has become one of the first fashion bloggers to be actively courted by the fashion industry, with Gucci, Lanvin and Chanel among the companies which have invited her to their shows.

Lau was in Dublin last week to judge the Nokia Young Fashion Designer competition - as the popularity of the blog has grown, so too has the demand for her appearance at events like these. Despite this, she’s philosophical about her unexpected rise to fashion industry fame.

‘‘I’m taking it as it comes,” she says. ‘‘The growth of the blog was quite a gradual thing in terms of traffic; it was when I started getting bits of press in places like Teen Vogue that it snowballed and became its own entity.”

Lau’s day job is commissioning editor of Dazed Digital, the online arm of lifestyle magazine Dazed And Confused. But her interest in fashion goes back to her childhood.

‘‘I’ve always been into personal style, which in many ways is quite different to fashion,” she says. ‘‘I’ve used the way I dress as a means of expressing myself ever since I’ve been able to dress myself.”

Her style, she says, is influenced by ‘‘lots of things - the weather, a film. I don’t think in terms of specific inspirations.”

Lau is just back from Paris Fashion Week, where she watched what she describes as ‘‘the show of the season’’ at Lanvin. ‘‘It was elegant, as Lanvin always is, but it had a harder edge in terms of the embellishments that were used and the way it was put together,” she says. ‘‘It felt really right for the times we’re living in - really decadent, but really right.”

It was her third time in Paris, but surprisingly, she isn’t all that fond of runway shows. ‘‘I don’t really take all that much pleasure in going to the shows, because they’re so frenetic and overwhelming,” she says. ‘‘But I love all the other stuff you get to do - speaking to designers, going to presentations. That’s the most enjoyable bit for me.”

Lau tips the Paris-based Heal as a label to watch, and is also excited about seeing Alexis Mabille’s next menswear show. As for Irish designers, she is full of praise for Tim Ryan. ‘‘I love his knitwear - I’ve been a fan of his work for the past three or four seasons, and I’m surprised he doesn’t have a higher profile,” she says.

But her wardrobe isn’t just filled with designer pieces: on the high street, she likes Topshop, as well as Japanese chain Uniqlo, which has a flagship store on Oxford Street in London.

‘‘They’re doing some really interesting collaborations with people like Opening Ceremony. Jil Sander has just become their creative director, so that’s really exciting. They’re like a better version of Gap,” she says. ‘‘I also really like Cos, which is the more expensive version of H&M, at the minute.

Their pieces are really well cut.’’ What were her criteria when it came to judging the young designers? ‘‘I didn’t have any specific aesthetic in mind, because everyone has their own point of view,” she says. ‘‘So long as there is a point of view, I’m happy - I want to see designers coming through really strongly, nothing half arsed.”

Lau says it’s doubtful that she will ever branch out into designing herself. ‘‘I’m definitely more of an admirer of design talent than someone who actually has design talent themselves,” she says. ‘‘I do have ideas but I don’t have the skills to do anything with them, so they’ll probably never materialise.”

In any case, she already finds it hard keeping up with the demands of her job and the blog. ‘‘It is difficult handling both, but Dazed have been really supportive and are very happy for me to keep working on the blog.”

She believes the recession is having a definite effect on fashion designers and their work.

‘‘You could really see it in Paris - people either played it really safe, or were really decadent and overly expressive,” she says. ‘‘It’s wishful thinking to predict that, because of the recession, everyone is going to stop buying cheap clothes and start saving up for really expensive pieces; instead, they’ll be looking at what they already have in their wardrobe. I know I certainly need to do that - I have tons of clothes, most of which I never wear. It’s very wasteful.”

Selective buying, Lau feels, will be the order of the day. ‘‘There will have to be an editing process, and things which were deemed excessive will be stripped away. ‘‘It’s an odd time in fashion, but I do think we’re starting to come out of it.”

http://stylebubble.typepad.com

The art of fashion blogging

Ann marie O’Connor’s blog, at http://iblogfashion.blogspot. com, is arguably one of Ireland’s snappiest and most respected fashion blogs. O’Connor is a fashion journalist who updates her blog daily with reports on everything from Paris Fashion Week to the latest fashion news. ‘‘I started blogging because I thought that it was a good opportunity to give voice to things that didn’t necessarily fit into the style of a particular publication,” says O’Connor.

‘‘As a journalist you are often bound by certain deadlines, but with blogging there is a spontaneity that you don’t get with journalism – you can take a picture of something with your phone and blog about it straight away. I also see it as quite self-gratifying, because I can talk about whatever I want, from the cost of dry cleaning to finding a pair of good socks.”

What makes a good blog, according to O’Connor, are passion and an individual voice. ‘‘A lot of people have jumped on the bandwagon because they think it’s a good way to make money, but what really makes a good blog is a good voice – it’s the person behind the information,” she says.

‘‘The whole idea of a blog is that it’s not supposed to be over thought – sometimes it’s bad to have too polished a voice, to censor your language or your dialect, for example.”

Visuals also have a particularly strong place, specifically in fashion blogging. ‘‘It’s important to have a visual lynchpin to anchor what it is that you’re talking about. For my blog written content is king, but I’m a very keen follower of street fashion blogs – and many of them are all image-based,” says O’Connor.

She believes it is the immediacy of the blog which appeals to people: ‘‘You need to be posting daily – that’s where blogs fit into the media mix. While you’ve got your daily, weekly and monthly publications, blogs are updated minute-by-minute. But they are not disparate – they are definitely conjoined.”

Other fashion blogs worth checking out include: http://dublinstreets.blog spot.com: has photos of people taken on the streets of Dublin, and also has great links to other street style blogs around the world.

http://www.thesartorialist. com: probably one of the most influential fashion bloggers, Scott Schuman has been interviewed by every publication of note, from French Vogue to Esquire.

His blog features images of inspiring, elegant and fashion forward dressers from around the world. Schuman also has a column in GQ magazine.

http://facehunter.blogspot. com/: showing that London really and truly is the home of rocking street style, you’ll find plenty of fashion inspiration on this mostly image-based site.

http://kingdomofstyle.type pad.co.uk: with posts from Queen Michelle and Queen Marie on everything from the length of their fringes to total shoe obsession, this is an example of a fashion blog with a very personal voice.

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