Guilty Pleasures

Just because I haven’t been blogging much myself doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading blogs. Quite the contrary, in fact. I read over 100, via a feed-reader, on a semi-regular basis. (Absurd! I know!) I just switched over from Bloglines to the cleaner looking and less wonky-acting NewsGator. So far, so good. I’ve also been working with my Spring interns, Anna + Christine, on the jen bekman blog. Part of teaching them about the wonders of blogging was passing along my .opml file into their own respective feedreaders. Once I did that, I felt a bit self-conscious wondering what their impressions would be of all the blogs I read. (Jury is still out on that one.)

A lot of my blog reading falls into the “guilty pleasures” category. I subscribe to far too many celebrity gossip blogs (provided that I can strip out enough of their crazy adds via Adblock in Firefox) and I also read a lot of fashion and style ones too. My two current favorites in the latter category are The Sartorialist and Imaginary Socialite.

Reading Imaginary Socialite is like eavesdropping on a party I haven’t been invited to. I stumbled across it via the Photos from Everyone feed on Flickr. Apparently the Imaginary Socialites go to a lot of fashion shows and can be found at Misshapes every damn weekend. They also care a lot about clothes. Despite this, they somehow don’t strike me as being hopelessly pretentious. In fact, it mostly just seems like they are having fun, and I like people who know how to have fun.

The Sartorialist consists largely of on-the-street photos of NYC’s fashionable denizens. Lots of the snaps are taken right near the gallery (stomping grounds for New York’s Look Book feature which recently featured jen bekman assistant Kate Chapman.) The Sartorialist has a great eye for the personal flair in people of all ages, shapes and sizes. I’m always excited to see fresh entries from there in my feed.

Recently featured on The Sartorialist was Andrea Longacre-White. Andrea is a talented photographer who received an honorable mention in the Winter Editon of Hey, Hot Shot! and curently has work on view at Tim Barber’s Tiny Vices show that recently opened at Spencer Brownstone. She also happens to live on my block - I didn’t put this all together until she stopped by the Hey, Hot Shot! opening the other evening, in her fetching short-sleeved coat as featured above. I said “You’re my neighbor! I see you when I’m walking Ollie… normally you could bring your pooch right into the gallery, but tonight it’s kind of crowded.” Once she introduced herself, I was glad to piece it all together - and then happy once more to see that she’d caught the eye of the discerning Sartorialist too. It’s a small world, even in (especially in?) blogland.