Blog Babes
Around 2005, fashion blogs became a thing, and if you were online enough to notice, you’d start seeing the same handful of girls everywhere. Not celebrities yet—the machine hadn’t kicked in yet. You just found them through links, sometimes by accident, and suddenly you’re looking at someone’s life in a way that feels almost intimate.
Ivy Behrens posting from Hamburg at 21, documenting the clothes she wore and the music videos that mattered—just living, letting the camera see it, and somehow that documentation made you want to understand how she moved through the world. Filippa Smeds from Sweden had that quality where you’d check back regularly. Jasmin Arensmeier was tall and blonde in a way that suggested she’d figured something out early. Rachel Lynch from Chicago was posting self-portraits, sometimes in lingerie, and yeah, there was something sexual about it, but it didn’t feel like a performance. Jessica Weiß was building something real with Les Mads, an actual fashion platform that was becoming something in the culture.
What made it all work was desire, pure and simple. Not just looking but wanting to understand how they lived, wanting to get close to them somehow, the physical attraction bleeding into something messier. The blogs themselves were crude sometimes, objectifying, but underneath that crudeness was something genuine: fascination with how people present themselves, how taste actually works, how you can show the world who you are without anyone giving you permission.
It’s strange to think about now, how small that internet was. You could find someone by following a thread, get genuinely invested in their life, feel a real connection across a screen. No algorithm deciding what you see, no engagement metrics, no business model. Just a girl with a camera and something to say, and people like me paying attention, trying to figure out how to live.
The girls are still out there probably, but the moment that made it all work is gone. Fashion blogging became an industry, and the internet stopped being a place you stumbled into and started being a place you were marketed to. What I miss isn’t the girls themselves—I don’t actually know them—but that feeling of discovery, of finding something real and genuine because you were curious enough to follow a link.