Self as oeuvre/other: Parisian fashion bloggers and the new "culte du Moi"

Abstract

Author's note: This article was written in early 2010—hardly the first days of the fashion blog, but before it had become as omnipresent as it is today. And before its commercial, transactional function had been perfected by a few particular technological developments, which quickly normalized the ethos of the fashion blogger's culte du moi into the everyday life of even the least fashion-obsessed, and which continued the dogged cultural march towards obscuring the distinction between editorial content and advertising. In other words: before Instagram and before the smart phone's self- facing camera. Car la Photographie, c'est l'avenement de moi-meme comme autre. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire In his preface to Lamartine's Meditations poetiques, Baudelaire expresses what would come to be known as the ethos of the culte du Moi of the nineteenth century Romantic French writers: Je n'imitais plus personne, je m'exprimais moi-meme pour moi-meme. Insisting at once on the originality of the author's essence and the pure expression of his person, Baudelaire's remark gives way to a conception of the liberated poet as he who turns inward to reflect the true nature of man through his artistic production. Given the weight of such a task, it is no surprise that Baudelaire both feared and scorned the emergence of photography as an art form. Though the camera threatened to usurp the status of the painter rather than that of the author, Baudelaire's description of photography as art's most mortal enemy is especially prescient in light of a particularly noxious fusion of literary and artistic production: the fashion blog. In what can be seen as a marriage between Baudelaire's Romantic doctrine and his mechanical adversary, the persistent craze of the fashion blog adopts photography as the very means of devoting oneself to a new and redefined culte du Moi. 1 Replacing the poet's introspection with flagrant exhibitionism, the fashion blogger's oeuvre consists of daily or near-daily