I was asked twice last week if I'd prepare a summary of fashion blogs with some commentary, in both cases for senior people in the Fashion Industry. The lists were slightly different so as to be tailored to their target audience, but here is an overview of my segmentation (I'll not reproduce the whole list, not least because it wasn't intended to be anything other than broadly representative of trends and hence unfairly left out too many people).

Top Independents

The top handful are as you might expect, with LibertyLondonGirl and Style Bubble setting the pace - I felt obliged to include Tavi on the grounds that she needs to be read by anyone trying to understand how the world of on-high fashion pronouncements is changing. For 'changing', read 'this is the point where the meteor hits'.

Mainstream Sites

I had little interest in listing mainstream sites, as my clients (and a good number of you reading this) are viewing far more of these than me, but I did think RDuJour was worth mentioning, as it is something of a blog / web hybrid - a bit flat when they just repeat ads or magazine covers, but I like it when they're acidic in commentary.

Style File - Visual Diaries

I'm a complete 'Visual Diary' junkie, and keep prodding stylish friends to start blogs to showcase their daily looks. I listed more people in this section than any other, including the ridiculously talented Jane at Sea of Shoes, to whom we will return in a moment. I have to mention The Cupcake Diary also, Alice produces such fabulous surprises (for instance, see The Aftermath, posted yesterday).

Street Style

Where The Sartorialist has led, a hundred street photographers have followed. Am most impressed by the stuff coming from Japan and Scandinavia at the moment, they seem to me to be historical and geographically significant documentaries, whereas the international pack take the same old shots of the same old models after every show and act like it's some random event. Still, Face Hunter is great, and I particularly like Yvan's own blog.

Personal Favourites

I rather indulged myself here, much to one client's delight, as she is now completely hooked on FASHEMATICS!!!. My personal choice from the list is another of Jane's projects at Sea of Shoes, a link in her sidebar to the frankly staggering "They don't call them lovers in high school, Leeland". The (mis)quote is from Twin Peaks, there are videos of Japan from the unrivalled Tin Drum album, and page after page of lush, sexy and inspiring photo archive. Oh, and she is seventeen. I was at the studio of the UK's most creative designer today, and we were trying to get some ridiculous piece of web-based software working. The machine we were using belonged to one of the hugely talented twenty-somethings that work for him, and on the Bookmarks bar, alongside Style.com was Sea of Shoes.

The Death Throes

Yesterday LLG posted the following story lambasting the Wall Street Journal for all but ignoring it's own editorial policy of fact-checking articles where bloggers are concerned; it seems that for some in the mainstream press those rules don't apply when the social web is involved. In the UK there have been some embarrassingly inept attacks on Twitter and Facebook by BBC News and various newspapers, articles which are all the more irritating for being researched and written by people who use social media every hour of their working lives (and no doubt in leisure time too) as an important tool. One of the people badly treated by the WSJ article was Jane, who, it was stated, had dropped out of school to pursue her blogging career. Her rebuttal is both brief and rather more charitable than many of us would have been in similar circumstances.

I'm reminded of the adage that the only reason the NY Times prints it's Corrections column is to make you believe everything else in the previous day's paper must have been true; it may be that some bloggers are overly sensitive to these perceived slights at the hands of their lumbering prehistoric forebears, simply because they are carefully reading every piece that crops up with an insider's gimlet eye. One thing I'm certain of, however; the nimble and fleet of foot now hold the advantage. Building immobile walls around your content in such a climate is (and I'm unable to remain as charitable as Jane here) a special kind of insanity.