This document discusses the rise of fashion blogs on Tumblr and how they are influencing trends. It profiles several fashion bloggers like Niki Takesh who use GIFs, memes and pop culture references to create unique aesthetic experiences on their blogs. Trends they have popularized, like "seapunk" in 2007, show how insignificant online subcultures can spread widely. The document argues that these blogs are reorienting the conservative fashion blog by reflecting hybrid subjective aesthetics and desires through rapid, single-click commentary.

1. E D I T O R I A L S T O R Y
I S S U E 1 - P A G E 2 0
ALL THE TUMBLR RAGE YOU NEED
TO KNOW
AMID HASH-TAGS, LIKES AND RE-BLOGS, THE ONCE SKEWED SAR-
TORIAL BLOG IS GETTING A NEW LEASE ON LIFE.
SARAH ALKHALED BEARS CELEBRATORY WITNESS TO THE BITMAP
ANIMATIONS THAT INFILTRATE THE AUTHENTIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF
THE CYBER-GENERATION.
GIFs, MP4s, MP3s and JPEGs-- to name
but a few--are virally trending, stream-
ing in overdrive, and ultimately cease-
less in the micro-Web 2.0 milieu. The
continuous advent of Internet-laced
memes have beckon primordial am-
ateur thrash of manic moving image
overload courtesy of those discrete
Tumblr-gravitating purveyors. From
the World Wide Web backend an au-
thentic sect of tech-infused taste-
makers are spewed out of its depths,
primarily propelled by their pure vis-
ceral desires. Click through this band
of otherworldly Tumblrs laden with all
the frantic emoticons, glitch hysteresis,
chronic time-loops, and hashtag idi-
oms they’ve succumb to “#LOL” and
“#WTF” over perpetually coalescing
into a pulsating “etherwork” of sorts
as lyricist, visual artist, and avid Tumblr
blogger Michael Stipe puts it. In short,
to its adherents these lush homepage
mashups, project a hologram-embod-
ied window into our post-Blogspot.
com “solution-based collective uncon-
scious.”12
On account of these astute-
1 Interview with Stipe at Bullett Magazine: http://bullett-
media.com/article/across-the-tumblrverse-confessions-of-
a-michael-stipe/
ly time-framed pixelated graffitis, its
communal executors are now able to
synthesize their raw authentic person-
hood into spectral pseudonym avatars
of themselves scoring the end-view-
er’s mind with a simple gesture, a facial
expression, a right-click delete com-
mand, or perhaps even a clout.
Their alternative dress reincarnations
and trending re-blog command are
worlds away from the rose-tinted
trademarked fashionistas, the likes of
Fashiontoast.com or Bryanboy.com.
Their ad nauseam stream of obscenely
vain wardrobe postings and their com-
modified online pseudo-fantasies are
lauded amongst the upper echelons
of the dogmatic fashion industry, while
ad-free Tumblr personas are left to
teeter on the waysides. Yet they hover
right on the edge of an existential cliff
amongst them is queen archetype of
Tumblr fashion-- Niki Takesh. Her blog
glitters under a pitch-black backdrop
of starry skies embellished with 90s
pop-iconography such that a young
Britney Spears is quick-masked into a
recent image of an African-American
model both locked in a romantic em-
brace, her site softly transitions into
screen grabs of Spears superimposed
onto online-based millennial relics like
the original beta-version of an Inter-
net Explorer window, and then all of a
sudden it breaks into an assortment of
GIF rainbow-gradient overlays. Takesh
pillages through her gritty net-dérive
of Tumblr posts, essentially warranting
all these pictorial disparates to sartori-
ally coalesce through her as evident by
a handful of personal photos of Takesh
and her friends. Blatantly obvious
Takesh has no qualms in not pumping
the tech-infused glam brakes-- #sea-
punk cosmetic striations, metallic skirts
à la Britney Spears in her heyday, ho-
lographically tinged palettes glint like
the micro-flickering of a RGB heart-
shaped desire of a Tumblr follower
as infatuation instantly parades over
her, come log-in. Yet all throughout
her Tumblr she shows no signs of de-
signer-brand namedropping, thus ob-
structing the utilitarian unison between
editorial elements and advertising. Day
in and day out, she becomes her own
physical IRL embodiment of a digital
avatar interlacing her reality with her
‘v-reality,’ with a futuristic flare so pre-
cise she trades in the facade of a typ-
ical blogger for a cyborg-humanoid
mélange, instead.
Drawing from Takesh and her con-
temporaries minimal commentary, less
cross-blog banter, and heavy-loaded
visual inventory reveals a shared primal
hunger for enhanced mortality, the
fuel to drive them kicking, scream-
ing, and singing into a new tawdry
whirlpool, yet calculated immortality.
Roughly around the year 2007, #sea-
punk arose as an aesthetic micro-genre
exclusively housed by Tumblr as on-
line avatars clamored around its gilded
gates hastily bombarding the cyber

4. .
ether with a flood of tagged #seapunk
imagery. From dolphin clip art, ‘90s
nostalgia references, and pastel-dyed
mermaids to name but a few #seapunk,
causing a whirlpool frenzy among a
small enclave of digitally-sensible Tum-
blr pioneers, but not because of its de-
sign breakthrough. Rather this online
tagging wouldn’t be a now-generation
phenomenon if it was not subject to
the same waning germaneness as say,
contemporary culture or fashion.
Self-proclaimed Internet-based artist
and all-around net connoisseur Parker
Ito further reveals, “That what is more
powerful, is that something as insig-
nificant and insular as #seapunk could
be picked up by Rihanna. That is mind
blowing and more interesting [to me]
than who wore it first.”2
Perhaps, the
trending #seapunk will eventually
evaporate into oblivion, much like any
other primordial Internet contraptions
before it. So, it seems there is noth-
ing wrong with taking a tired cliché
and feeding it with all the real (or is it
artificial?) embellishments it can han-
dle. However, it begs the counter-ar-
gument, as to how doesn’t it somehow
derive from a powerful subconscious--
a vibrant synergistic intellect that as
all things once under-the-radar are at
2 Interview with Parker Ito: http://posts.rend3rzine.com/
post/47549427563/meet-parker-ito-the-artist-who-be-
lieves-in-himself
the end being celebrated in increas-
ingly omniscient ways. The main take-
away notation from this micro-genre
#seapunk calibration is that as much as
there is mockery here, there is an equal
earnestness webbed within the amass-
ing global culprits of sick excess as eas-
ily transmuted as it was once put to-
gether. The message is loud and clear
these digital media echo not the ten-
sion between birth and demise, winner
and failure, etc. Instead what matters
are the processes that get you there:
surfing the curtails of the Internet,
downloading MP3s, animating GIFs, lik-
ing pictures on Instagram, re-blogging
your instantaneous desires on Tumblr or
otherwise.
In similar vein, novice Spanish fashion
designer Roberto Piqueras laminates
3D glitchy renderings, blight-y refer-
enced digital symbolic collages with
the Olympic rings obstructing every
inch of the British Queen’s eyes, re-
stricted to our PC screens Adobe
Photoshop-reserved transparent boxes
enigmatically adorn its wearers, as he
undoubtedly slashes through our hy-
per-connected digital lives, in and be-
tween those spaces with his own Tumblr
avatar to boot--check it! Yet, Piqueras
aptly entrances particular locale rel-
ics from his own Spanish roots into his
globally digitized-laden collections, as
he attests, “I made the Olympic rings
design during my career in Spain, it
was a tribute or a critic of the Olym-
pic Games held in Barcelona in 1992...I
like to use symbols from the city I’m
currently living in, that’s why my work
right now [AW 13] and my SS13 person-
ify these elements.”3
The first thing
to note here is that very, very few in
fashion at present are quipped enough
to play such mind games-- throw out
the spectacle creators, the elite trick
ponies whose one-and-only simulative
‘high-taste’ sensibilities rapidly plum-
met their material productions into the
doldrums.
What’s left is an innovative band of
Tumblr proprietors- the true game
changers as they embark on reorient-
ing the conservative fashion-directed
blog as a sort of beatnik crusader for
the millennial generation. There is a
striation across this pantheon, which
despite purchasing banal commodities,
that reflects a hybrid network of sub-
jective moralities such that their errat-
ic single-click commentary behaviors
tug at their hyper-amplified aesthetic
nuances and desires, however obtuse
or acute they may come to be. It’s still
this precocious talent exhibited by a
steadily growing number of microblog-
ging adherents that have resuscitated
cultural optimism in the new-genera-
tion.
3 Interview with Roberto Piqueras: http://www.beigeuk.
com/2013/03/designer-profile-roberto-piqueras/