Love Notes from the Fashion Gutter
Last night I dreamed about piranhas. Hundreds of them, possibly thousands, circling me in a sunlit pond—your mother was there too, for reasons my sleeping brain declined to explain—and when they finally closed in, instead of tearing the meat off my bones, they put on limited H&M collections and started photographing each other with oversized DSLRs. I woke up drenched, heart hammering. I knew exactly what the dream was about.
The BYM Modeblog-Diskurs & Kritik-Thread had been running for over a year: a rolling, anonymous tribunal for anyone who’d made the mistake of being a fashion blogger with a visible internet presence. It lived on a German fashion forum and had grown too traffic-heavy for even the site admins to kill. The members were not in the business of constructive criticism. Terrible hair, terrible complexion, terrible tits,
wrote one user about a Norwegian blogger who’d done nothing except post photos of herself. Another thread spent several pages on a 15-year-old from a small Bavarian town who’d uploaded photos in stockings—moral outrage at a teenager being vaguely sexual online, delivered anonymously, which is quite the ethical position to take.
A foreign blogger, relentlessly mocked over her proportions, eventually wrote: First the Germans killed my great-grandfather, and now they’re after me.
A father posted that his daughter wanted to jump off the balcony because of what the thread had said about her. And this journal got its own mention, naturally: They keep getting shabbier… if that’s even possible.
There’s something almost clarifying about a space like that—not because the cruelty is justified, but because it strips away the performance of mutual encouragement that the rest of the fashion internet required. In 2011, style blogging ran on an economy of aspiration and positive reinforcement, everyone commenting gorgeous!
on everyone else’s outfit photos. The BYM thread was the unmediated version of what a lot of people were quietly thinking. Fashion 4chan. A place where you genuinely couldn’t tell whether a given post was going to make you want to throw up or get hard. Sometimes the answer was both, in the same scroll, which is its own kind of information about yourself.
The damage it caused was real. The teenager, the father watching his daughter fall apart, the blogger reaching back through family history to make sense of being targeted—none of that was abstract. And yet the thread kept going, kept being read, kept generating the traffic the admins supposedly wanted to stop. Even I read every word the thread wrote about this journal. Multiple times. That’s the confession this kind of place extracts from everyone eventually: you came back, which means you already agreed to the terms.
I’d hate to see it gone. Which is probably exactly what those Topshop-wearing piranhas want to hear.