Marc Jacobs names a Louis Vuitton handbag after Bryanboy posted about it on his blog, calling it the BB Ostrich bag. By this point, the blogger has his own signature pose, which is meant to highlight accessories like designer bags.

Tavi Gevinson launches her blog Style Rookie as an 11-year-old living in the suburbs of Chicago. Some members of the press question whether or not her parents are ghostwriting it. (They are not.) Meanwhile, Sicardi puts Style Rookie on a list of top seven “brilliant blogs,” writing: “If we weren’t already married I’d move to Chicago and adopt her as my little sister. True story. Is my rabid fangirlism bothering you yet?”

Elizabeth Spiridakis Olson, an art director at T Magazine and author of the blog White Lightning, writes about Tavi and the “next generation” of style bloggers for the magazine. “Whereas a decade ago, suburban girls with a craving for fashion daydreamed via the pages of Vogue, today’s budding fashionista has access to a world of sick looks on her laptop.”

It’s reported that Doré and Schuman are dating.

Ton starts photographing street style for Style.com.

Teen Vogue features Sicardi in an article about young bloggers alongside Jane Aldridge, a 16-year-old living in Texas who writes a blog called Sea of Shoes, Karla Deras, the 19-year-old author of Karla’s Closet, and Rumi Neely, 24, who started Fashion Toast.

Lawrence Schlossman, a 22-year-old working in for-profit education and living in Charlotte, North Carolina, launches Sartorially Inclined, a menswear blog on Blogspot.

“I was not a member of the forums,” he says now, at the age of 37. “They can be hard to break into as a new person. There are caste systems and pecking orders and hierarchies; it’s very much a lunch table type vibe, where once you break in and you’ve been indoctrinated, I can be an amazing community and resource. But I was like, ‘I’m good on that.’ I jumped into the growing blog community instead. I was lucky enough that my blog gained some traction, and I built an audience. I was living and working in North Carolina at the time—just a standard white-collar job—and I would fly back home and stay with my parents in New Jersey so I could go to the trade shows that were happening at the time in New York City.”

Gevinson covers Pop’s fall issue at the age of 13. The British magazine’s then-editor-in-chief, Dasha Zhukova, invites her to create a zine insert with a handful of other bloggers. Gevinson asks Laia Garcia-Furtado of Geometric Sleep, plus the creator of Fake Karl Lagerfeld and Spiridakis Olson, to help her.

Above: Pop magazine fall 2009 cover featuring Tavi Gevinson with cover artwork by Damien Hirst.

Relive Gevinson and Garcia-Furtado’s highs and lows of cross-Atlantic flights and partying with Richard Prince and Björk HERE.

The Federal Trade Commission requires bloggers and other online content creators to disclose any material connections they have with brands or companies when promoting or endorsing products or services.

Gevinson writes a column for the January issue of Harper’s Bazaar about the spring collections, making her the youngest reporter ever to appear in the pages of the magazine, according to then-editor-in-chief Kristina O’Neill, who met Gevinson at a Marc Jacobs show earlier that year.

Anne Slowey, a senior editor at ELLE, tells The Cut that the move “feels a bit gimmicky.” Meanwhile, the Huffington Post’s longtime contributing style editor Lesley M. M. Blume thinks Gevinson is a novelty. “She will be a story for a while and it will either die out, and she’ll fade away, or she’ll become a fashion editor,” she tells reporter Amy Odell, who now writes a popular fashion Substack called Back Row. “She might not be so sweet and precocious in a few years after being inundated with this kind of press. Worst-case scenario she ends up overwhelmed and messed up, but no one can predict that.”

Dolce & Gabbana fills its front row with bloggers, including Bryanboy, Doré, Ton, and Schuman. Bryanboy is seated two positions to the right of Wintour. “Do I think, as a publicist, that I now have to have my eye on some kid who’s writing a blog in Oklahoma as much as I do on an editor from Vogue? Absolutely,” Cutrone tells the Times, changing her tune. “Because once they write something on the internet, it’s never coming down. And it’s the first thing a designer is going to see.”

But you may be wondering, Where was Lau? “I said ‘no,’ because I couldn’t get the time off work,” she explains. “When it happened, it sent the media into overdrive or an existential crisis of, Are bloggers gonna kill print? It started all these think pieces, which now seem kind of ridiculous, about this blogger-versus-print narrative. There were definitely editors who were very, very sniffy and snobby about bloggers and the whole self-publishing universe and didn’t want anything to do with them. They were very sniffy about websites in general. The idea of exposing fashion online or putting up an editorial online was the antithesis of what they wanted in their professional eyes. But I also think the media stirred up a bit more than what was actually happening in reality.”

Vogue features Ton, Bryanboy, and Doré in its March “Power” issue, alongside Catherine Kallon, founder of Redcarpet-fashionawards.com, Mary Tomer, who started a blog about Michelle Obama’s style, Michelle Phan, a beauty YouTuber, the photographer and illustrator Todd Selby, and the blogger and model Hanneli Mustaparta. “Blogging can command a profile in the fashion world, bringing a certain kind of power and privilege,” declares Mark Holgate, fashion news director at Condé Nast.

Gevinson wears a large bow-shaped hat by Stephen Jones to Couture Week in Paris. A disgruntled Grazia editor seated behind her at the Dior show fires off a tweet from the second row: “At Dior. Not best pleased to be watching couture through 13 year old Tavi's hat.”

Leandra Medine starts a blog called Man Repeller at the age of 21 while studying journalism at New York University.

Emily Weiss, a 25-year-old former assistant at Vogue, starts Into the Gloss, a beauty website.

Gevinson gets a New Yorker profile, in which she is likened to a “Buddhist child deity.”

Vogue finally launches its own website, Vogue.com.

Oh is hired by Vogue as a street-style photographer.

“All of a sudden, everybody was so much nicer to me,” he says. “I would send requests to PRs like, ‘Hi, my name is Phil. I have this blog, blah, blah, blah. Every season, a few more ‘nos’ would turn into standing invites. And then a few more standing invites would turn into, ‘We’d love to have you, please come.’”

Instagram launches.

José Criales-Unzueta, a teenager living in La Paz, Bolivia, joins Tumblr. There, he starts following future fashion designer Peter Do, not knowing that he will one day be reviewing his eponymous brand’s collections as a writer for Vogue Runway.

“I was super chubby and very nerdy,” he says now, at age 29. “I didn’t have anyone to talk about fashion with, and I was also in the closet. The idea of being open in any way was very scary to me, and that’s why the internet became so important to me. I was like, oh my God, I can be whatever I want on Tumblr, and no one will ever know.”

Schlossman, Gvishiani, Russell, and Sicardi also join Tumblr. As does Dara, who is now the fashion director of Interview magazine.

“Tumblr wasn’t just a mood board for menswear; it was also great for its Q&A feature,” says Schlossman. “It was like recommendation culture now where people would be like, ‘How does this brand of shoes fit?’ Or, ‘What do I wear to a wedding?’”

Kling cofounds NowManifest, a fashion blog aggregator platform.

Blogger Amber Venz launches RewardStyle, an invitation-only platform that allows bloggers to earn a commission every time a reader clicks on one of their hyperlinks and buys something.

Gevinson launches Rookie magazine.

“We were all very, very close,” says Sicardi, who joined as a contributing writer in 2012. “We went to each other’s houses for birthdays. We swapped clothes. We were more of a sisterhood.”

Complex Media launches Four Pins, a menswear blog geared toward a younger audience that offers a more humorous take on fashion and streetwear.

The Times writes a story about male fashion bloggers featuring Schlossman, Williams, and others. “NOT every fashion blogger is a 15-year-old girl with an unhealthy obsession with Rei Kawakubo,” says author Alexis Swerdloff. “Some are older. And some are men.”

Kim France, who was fired from Lucky magazine in 2010 after serving as its founding editor for over a decade, launches her own blog, Girls of a Certain Age, aimed at women over 40.

“For me, it was really great because when I was the editor-in-chief of a magazine, if I thought a designer's clothes were poorly made for how expensive they were, I couldn’t just say that,” she says.

Schlossman is named editor-in-chief of Four Pins, following founding editor Noah Johnson, who is currently the global style director at GQ.

“At this point, I was able to get real jobs in this industry based on my digital footprint with blogging and writing and the audience I’d established,” Schlossman says.

He soon asks Rachel Tashjian Wise, who at the time had her own blog called Pizza Rulez and is now a fashion writer for the Washington Post, to start writing for the site.

“The unfortunate truth is that it is often easier to break through with an original point of view writing about menswear,” she says. “Robin [Givhan] started as a menswear writer, for example. Maybe that's true in a broader sense—the streetwear-slash-drop models of fashion come from men’s, as do many of the past decade’s most important designers, like Raf Simons and Virgil. Part of that is that they never ask anyone to fit into a box; too often in women’s, we want people to fill a certain role. I think the Four Pins guys would just find people they liked and let them rip. I was the first woman writer on the site and there was nothing old-school Esquire lad mag pinup about me or my writing, and I thought it was really cool that Lawrence thought of me. I liked writing provocative pieces—you know, ‘takes’—how Suzy Menkes’s anti-blogger story was awesome even though I was a blogger; how New York Fashion Week was filled with too many wannabes; why men shouldn’t take selfies—I think I argued that vanity is the province of women, and I think I still agree with that. I wrote a story about how I stood in line for the first sacai x Nike drop and could finally relate to hypebeasts. The idea was to be really funny and savvy about brands and music. Self-deprecation was key. I always felt like we were telling guys it was OK to care about clothes, and that if you could adapt this voice or point of view, that made you part of a community.”

Condé Nast buys NowManifest, bringing Anna Dello Russo, Bryanboy, and Lau on board as contributors.

Suzy Menkes writes about the “Circus of Fashion” happening outside shows, speaking about street style.

“All of a sudden, all these people that used to come out wearing their best Nicolas Ghesquière Balenciaga and all their fun Proenza Schouler started dressing down because they felt ashamed by this article,” says Oh. “You know the saying, ‘The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut?’ People didn’t want to seem like they were peacocking, and then we saw the rise of normcore.”

Patreon launches as a way for creators to monetize their content.

BoF, which at this point is a bonafide website, launches the BoF 500. Standen, Lau, Yambao, Pernet, Schuman, Ton, Doré, and Medine are all on it. Many others mentioned in this timeline will also be honored at a later date, including Tashjian.

Man Repeller relaunches as a content platform with staff, rather than a personal-style blog about Medine alone.

Givhan declares “The Golden Era of Fashion Blogging Is Over” in an essay for The Cut. “The distance between the Establishment and fashion’s once-dazzling revolutionaries has narrowed, and there is minimal distinction between them,” she writes. “Because what the fashion industry loves, it woos—then swallows whole.”

Sicardi starts writing a beauty advice column for Teen Vogue and working as a beauty assistant.

Doré and Schuman break up.

Weiss launches Glossier.

@dietprada shares its first post on Instagram.

Condé Nast shutters NowManifest and, more devastatingly, folds Style.com into Vogue Runway soon thereafter as part of a strategic decision to consolidate and focus on its main titles. Later, the URL will be repurposed in a failed e-commerce attempt with Farfetch.

“I think there was something very pure about Style.com,” says Standen. “‘See fashion first’ was the official motto, but our internal motto was, ‘For fashion obsessives, by fashion obsessives.’ It was a shared passion. We were also a relatively small, very tight operation. In those days, there weren’t the kind of clickbait imperatives that became part of the internet, for better or worse. When Style.com was in its heyday, it was before the idea that everyone had to be chasing the exact same story, and posting about whatever topic was trending. It was a destination, and people spent time there. They didn’t click on one story and never return. Our audience was built on people who came obsessively, all the time. I don’t know if Style.com could have maintained that way. The only way would have been by becoming a subscription site, and I think probably was a loyal enough audience that that might have worked. But obviously, that’s not easy to maintain, either. It was at its peak when it ended, so people have a good feeling about it.”

Kim Russell, a teenager living in Perth, Australia, starts posting outfits on Polyvore, a social commerce website where users can create and share collages or “sets” of fashion items, interior designs, and other products, and gains a following. She posts her Polyvore looks on Instagram as @kimberlythestylist and gains a following there as well. She also starts sharing fashion commentary and history on Twitter as @thekimbino.

“I always had a desire to work in fashion, but it’s one of those really far-fetched careers, especially as someone who didn’t properly study at a school like Central Saint Martins or Parsons—you don’t really know the avenue you can take,” she says now, at the age of 28. “Where I’m from is one of the furthest cities from any other city in the world. So we weren’t that up to date on magazines and traditional forms of fashion media.”

During his freshman year of college at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Luke Meagher launches a YouTube channel called HauteLeMode. Before that, the native Staten Islander had a blog of the same name where he posted street-style photos, which he took walking from Xavier, his high school on Sixteenth Street, to the Staten Island Ferry. Bryanboy was a frequent subject. Both are active on so-called high-fashion Twitter, a corner of the platform populated by young fashion fans celebrating work that was made long before they were born.

“If hypebeast twitter is driven by the machismo jawnz-copping-swashbuckling meme-itude of Four Pins, hf twitter brings the snobbery and condescension of, say, the Devil Wears Prada to nearly everything,” writes Tashjian Wise later in a GQ article on the community.

Schlossman, who at this point is working at Grailed, launches a menswear podcast called Failing Upwards with Complex Editor James Harris on Soundcloud. They quickly grow a following and are eventually approached by Barstool Sports about a partnership.

In a roundtable discussion about their experience at Milan Fashion Week, Vogue editors start yet another war with bloggers. “Note to bloggers who change head-to-toe paid-to-wear outfits every hour: please stop,” wrote creative digital director Sally Singer, according to reports. “Find another business. You are heralding the death of style.” Chief critic Sarah Mower also apparently called them “pathetic.”

“Let’s not pretend that editors and stylists are not beholden to brands in one way or another, getting salaries at publications that are stuffed full of credits that are tied to paid advertising but not explicitly stated as such,” wrote Lau in a thread response on Twitter. Bryanboy called it “schoolyard bullying.”

Iolo Lewis Edwards launches the High Fashion Talk group on Facebook, which eventually gains some 40,000 members.

Substack launches.

Kim Kardashian follows Russell back on Twitter after she says something positive about a Prada look from her Love magazine shoot with Steven Klein.

@dietprada crosses the 1 million followers mark.

Sicardi joins Substack and starts the newsletter You’ve Got Lipstick On Your Chin, writing about beauty, culture, and identity.

Lau becomes a contributing editor at Pop magazine.

Tashjian Wise is hired as a fashion critic for GQ magazine.

Criales-Unzueta, who moved to New York after fashion school and eventually got a job as an assistant fashion designer at Coach, posts his first Instagram Stories review of a brand.

“I didn't consider myself a true writer at the time,” he says. “But I would post something on Instagram, and editors would see it and be like, ‘Can you turn this into a story?’ It was the beginning of this big fashion commentator thing. Pierre M’Pelé, also known as @pam_boy, was doing emoji reviews, Luke of @hautelemode was doing reviews, and you had people like Louis Pisano. We didn’t really know what to call ourselves. I was like, I’m not a critic; I’m a kid. I had too much reverence for the word and the Vanessa [Friedman]s and the Cathy [Horyn]s and the Nicole [Phelps] and the Tim [Blanks]. I was like: I’m not them. But a lot of bloggers had gone into legacy media, and I think Instagram and Twitter, but primarily Instagram, at least in my experience, opened up the floodgates again.”

Failing Upwards relaunches as Throwing Fits after Schlossman and Harris exit their partnership with Barstool Sports. It is currently the number one men’s fashion and lifestyle podcast globally, according to Apple.

“When we’re approached by potential partners in a variety of different capacities in which we could work with them, I think that they definitely see the numbers,” said Schlossman. “They definitely see the noise and the chatter. But I think the big thing for me, and I think some recognize it, and sometimes we have to sell it and double down on it, is that like, not only is like the community, well, I hate using that term, but like, we’ll just go with that, ‘the community,’ not only are they engaged, but the enthusiasm is infectious across the board. And I think that starts with James and myself, and why we do what we do. Even though it’s our job, and it pays our rent and shit, we love this stuff.”

Russell is flown out to California to consult for Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 8 collection.

“That’s when I felt like, OK, I can make this something real,” she says of her career.

Lau announces that she’s taking a step back from blogging, citing changes in both her personal life and the digital landscape.

High-fashion Twitter hosts an unofficial Met Gala.

France brings Girls of a Certain Age to Substack.

“When I was on a blog, I did shopping posts five days a week because that’s how I made my living—through affiliate links,” she says. “Having paid subscribers allows me more flexibility in terms of what I post, and I get to show stuff that’s a little more indicative of my taste.”

She also adds: “I always say that Substack gave a generation of writers back their jobs. People who were magazine writers who no longer had any venues for their work. And if they had a decent following as a journalist, they can grow a pretty decent following and make an OK living off of that.”

Medine steps down from Man Repeller following criticism over the company’s handling of issues related to diversity and inclusion. The business rebrands as Repeller, but is shut down shortly after, citing challenges compounded by the pandemic.

Throwing Fits gets its New Yorker piece (though not in print).

Medine quietly launches an eponymous Substack. She later rebrands as The Cereal Aisle.

Gvishiani joins Instagram as @stylenotcom, posting white text over a blue background with fashion news and humorous yet reverent commentary.

“He has that fans-eye view,” says Standen. “He says all the things you notice as an editor, but you don’t necessarily report: the venue, the crowd, the sense of anticipation before the first look comes out. That real-time excitement he conveys in his posts is maybe the closest in spirit to the way people felt about Style.com at the time, waiting for images from Chanel or VETEMENTS to post.”

Williams brings A Continuous Lean to Substack.

Becky Malinsky, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, joins Substack with the newsletter 5 Things You Should Buy.

Jenny Walton, former fashion director of The Sartorialist, joins Substack as Jenny Says Quoi.

Doré brings her personal blog to Substack.

Sicardi is probably never going back.

“What is there left for us in traditional media?” they ask. “I’m so sorry to people that are really trying. But having worked in a traditional media environment and having worked in a newer media environment, I’m being so honest with you, you could not pay me enough to go back into this landscape because there’s no plan of how to evolve in a way that makes sense. At the end of the day, every top-level executive solution is to pivot to video and pray. I’m uninterested. I left when I did because I knew that I could do things better for myself and my own sanity on my own terms. It’s obviously not been as stable, but I get to wake up every day and think about what I want to do and then go do it, and I don’t have to ask a boss for time off or think about my traffic numbers. It’s just better for me.”

In addition to writing, they also now teach classes and offer writing mentorships.

Tashjian Wise sends out the first edition of Opulent Tips, an “invitation-only natural style-email newsletter.”

Pierre A. M’Pelé is named head of editorial content at GQ France.

Rian Phin, an aspiring designer from Southern Florida who started writing for Rookie magazine at around 20, joins TikTok after establishing a presence on Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube as @thatadult. She gains a following as a critic and theorist with extensive knowledge of fashion history and design, eventually being dubbed a “TikTok Fashion Professor” at the age of 29.

“I started seeing how young men on TikTok were talking about Rick Owens and the Playboy Carti ‘Opium aesthetic,’ like Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake’s work, and I just felt like it was really misogynistic and ahistorical,” says Phin, who now lives in Brooklyn. “It made me feel really uncomfortable because I was like, this isn’t what online fashion culture is supposed to be like. So I started making videos mostly to challenge them and encourage them to think and talk about it in a different way. And then I turned it into teaching people to learn about fashion.”

Garcia-Furtado is hired as senior fashion news editor at Vogue Runway.

Throwing Fits is featured in the New York Times.

Criales-Unzueta is hired at Vogue Runway as a fashion news writer.

“The important thing for me was to maintain the ability to report on the internet—what queer people and weirdos on the internet are still doing, or are into—and preserve the way we speak,” he says. “The way I speak on the internet is still the way I write. It’s a little more cleaned up and Vogue-ified, but that also has to do with me growing up and having a really good editor.”

Lauren Sherman, a former writer and editor at both Style.com and Business of Fashion, launches Fashion People, a newsletter with the upstart boutique media outlet Puck.

Gevinson, who has built a successful career as an actor at this point, joins Substack as TGmail.

“When I used to write a blog (takes drag of cigarette…dips head back…exhales slowly) I didn’t always see what I did as writing or photography because the internet was so new and everything online seemed to me like a less serious, too-novel version of art-making that came before,” she writes in her first post. “I think I was wrong—I wrote and took photos, even every day for some stretches—but I also think not seeing these hobbies as Writing or Photography is part of why I was able to do them. It took some pressure off.”

Russell lands a Harper’s Bazaar Australia digital cover, which dubs her “digital fashion’s purveyor of taste.” Working as a professional stylist, she also consults on Tems’s Met Gala look.

“Every day, I get messages saying, ‘I was this close to giving up on fashion,’” she says. “A lot of Black women in Australia said it was uplifting.”

Medine writes in one of her newsletters: “It seemed like traditional fashion blogging died completely during the pandemic, even though it had been suffocating for years on account of the rising popularity of short-form, bite-sized, conveniently instant stories thanks to Instagram. In that transition, we lost a lot of originality to algorithmic sameness. I think what newsletters have given their audiences is a return to that sense of originality.”

Schlossman and Harris bring Throwing Fits to Substack from Patreon.

“I’m always thankful that I just nutted up and joined Blogspot when I did,” says Schlossman. “Because if it wasn’t for that, like, we’re not having this conversation now, and Lord knows what I’m doing for a living, or if I’m dead. I literally can’t do anything else. My brain has one speed, and that speed is cool clothes. And all the other shit that comes with it when we talk about cool clothes.”

By now, Phin says high-fashion Twitter has mostly dissolved. “It was really oriented around community and fellowship, which is what I think a lot of online fashion spaces used to be like—lonely people, gay people, people of color, marginalized people adjacently interested in high-fashion and wanting to connect. It feels kind of dead now, to be honest. That’s not to say you can’t still be a part of an online community, but I think people see it as less of an online community and more of a vehicle to enter the industry, and it’s not as fun. A lot of people have also grown up and grown out of it. So maybe it’s just past its prime.”

Standen is currently dean of the School of Fashion at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Oh is still at Vogue: “I’m just a grumpy, middle-aged blogger to be shipped off to the retirement home for washed-up bloggers.”

Gvishiani is being recognized on planes, despite never showing his face on Instagram: “I was on an ITA Airways flight from Paris to Milan, and this flight attendant looked at me and said, ‘I love what you do.’ I was not wearing my @stylenotcom cap, so I was a bit confused. I was like, ‘What do you mean?’”

Lau, who is now the digital editorial director of System magazine in London, would join Substack, but she’s got a bit too much on her plate. “It’d feel like going back to my roots, and I miss writing as an exercise as well,” she says. “Obviously, I’ve written for different publications over the years, but you kind of end up losing your own voice a bit, and you have to sacrifice some things in order to be on other people’s platforms. So yeah, I’d love to. Just give me an extra me.”

Criales-Unzueta is promoted to fashion news editor at Vogue Runway.

Gevinson has no regrets: “When we look back now, we can see what was really special about it and what we took for granted, especially in terms of how much everything was about to change regarding technology and social media,” she says. “At the time, sitting at a computer felt so cold and new and digital and not romantic. I could not have anticipated that there was actually an intimacy to blogging and these relationships in the fashion world that were opening up before me and the sense of community.”