Washed Silk is Freedom
What's in a name? It seems, in the current blogging frenzy, everything hangs on the quality of your blog's title. After searching endlessly for mine to no avail, I decided to try out one of the many 'blog name generators' set up online to inspire those of us with mental block.
Not truly intending to find anything sensible enough to use, I found myself looking at fashionblognamegenerator.com, a very prettily presented web page that claims, "AT A LOSS FOR WHAT TO NAME YOUR FASHION BLOG? JUST HIT THE BUTTON AND WE'LL DO IT FOR YOU." Under this promising tagline is a shiny big button emblazoned with the words, 'Name Me'. How could I resist the Alice in Wonderland simplicity of this command...
Five minutes later and I had seen multitudes of random combinations of words deemed appropriate to describe fashion content; a few of my favourites were 'Mimosas and Shallots', 'Cookies of Turquoise' and 'Farmer of Curvy'. When the true gem of a heading, 'Washed Silk is Freedom' came up I genuinely considered naming my blog just that to demonstrate my love of irony. But I think it might come across strangely on a Google search.
The vast quantity of websites like this using computers to fake originality struck a harrowing chord in me. Are we really so devoid of creativity that we have to let a random generator decide a few words which are intended to define our (probably very imaginative) written work online? It confirms my suspicion that 'randomness' is now the norm for most Internet moguls.
A few years ago, quirky names, song titles, and indeed fashion sense were the domain of the cool ones among us who were brave enough to break out of stereotypes and embrace the alternative: the original 'hipsters'. In my earlier teenage years when the cool kids were listening to chart hits by Ne-Yo, Cascada and 3 of a Kind ('babycakes, you just don't know know...'), I was into Alanis Morissette and a little known pop-punk band called Sugarcult. I always considered myself to be somewhat ahead of the curve on the music scene because I discovered the YouTube channel WatchListenTell, which showcases up and coming new bands in beautiful sepia-toned HD acoustic video recordings. They now have over 54,000 subscribers and I no longer feel part of an elite group of "in the know" music lovers.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd without looking absolutely bonkers - see Helena Bonham Carter, below, for inspiration - so how do we express our differences? For me, my key to originality is literature. The Guardian stated in February 2013 that 'four million UK adults never read books for pleasure'. That's a quarter of the population. So, I'm naming my blog after the first novel of one of my favourite writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because it's still cool to be clever.
Read the article in the Guardian here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/14/4-million-uk-adults-never-read-books
Photo from fashionlover.com
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