The outfits! The nails! The hair! The tattoos! SUNY Purchase students have a reputation for their fashion sense. Take a look at this blog, which captures all the creativity that gets paraded around campus each day.
Click on a picture to see the photos up close.
Alina Suriel started this blog using her nom de plume – Alina Angelica – in my Journalism 1 class last semester and she’s worked hard to keep it going. She calls it her “virtual closet” and blogs about her outfits in photo-oriented posts. She also takes her camera out onto the Mall, around campus, and to parties, creating a digital canvas of the groovy Purchase sartorial scene.
She breezed into my office recently, and I persuaded her to answer some questions about her blog, which she was kind enough to do in a subsequent email exchange:
1) When did you start the blog and what was the idea behind it?
I started the blog about 4 months ago in your class. I had been meaning to blog for a while, and so sitting through a whole lesson about blogging was a great kickstart to that. This blog is a virtualization of something I would do when I was younger to keep track of my outfits. I would keep lists of the individual components of the outfit (black cowboy boots, striped blue shirt, etc) on index cards, as a reference if I ever didn’t know what to wear. In my blog when I post about myself I still list the things I wear as tags which link back to other things I’ve worn with that item.
2) Describe the process: how do you get your ideas for what you do, what goes in to each post?
There are a few different ways to get things for my blog. I take pictures of people I see around Purchase for the candids of other people, although I’m not brave enough to actually go outside of Purchase and start doing this. I also put projects that I’m working on or that I’ve completed and photos of me in outfits that I like. I try not to use too much content that hasn’t been created by myself or someone I know, but once in a while I also post links to other things related to fashion, like articles or a great short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a girl cutting her hair into a bob. I also put things that are not necessarily fashion related, although I try to keep those things to a minimum. It’s sometimes hard to focus my blog, because it would be a lot easier to put a whole much of off-message stuff on it but I want to take it a little more seriously than that.
3) What has the reaction been at Purchase to your blog?
The reaction at Purchase has been really great so far. A lot of the people who actually tell me that they read it are people I’m not super close friends with, and other people get really excited when I take their picture for it because they’ve seen it before. Sometimes I’ll start to tell someone about something I’m wearing or doing or making and they’ll already know about it because they’ve read my blog, and that’s always nice because it makes me feel like someone’s actually paying attention. It’s not easy to keep this thing going every single day by myself.
4) What are your plans for your blog?
Well, it’s not easy to keep this thing going every single day all by myself, with all the classes I need to attend and working my other job at the PAC (Performing Arts Center), but keep it going I will. It’s really be a growing process. I’ve gotten a lot better at taking photos, something I’ve never bothered to do before now. Ideally I’m going to have business cards printed up to give to the people I post in the street candids, because I’m trying to expand my audience. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with this blog actually. I read a lot of blogs written by people who do this as an entire career, and I don’t know if I see this blog turning into that. I don’t know what I see this blog turning into actually. It really depends on what it turns into on it’s own and how many people keep reading.
journoprof 