Digital dressing up: modelling female teen identity in the discursive spaces of the fashion blogosphere

Blogs, which resemble online diaries, represent a popular space for teenagers to write about their experiences and publish their thoughts on the Web. This ability offers a particularly valuable resource for teenagers in their formation and enactment of social identities. In this article, I examine how teen girls model their identity through the mediated spaces of fashion blogs. Given the broad choices in putting together fashion outfits and accessories for their blogs, I suggest that how teen girls conceptualise their online visual representation may offer a resource for how they come to realise their emerging offline identity. Through the processes of writing, reading and commenting on blogs, these teens engage in complex expressions of identity, using a range of multimodal resources. Via the perceptions and experiences of 10 female teen fashion bloggers, I question the importance of a dialogic interaction with other bloggers for how teens come to understand their own identity and cultural tastes. In so doing, I draw on the work of Bourdieu (1996) to demonstrate the discursive spaces of the blog as critical to the activity of trading cultural and social capital and, importantly, shaping expressions of emerging teen identity.