A Walk Down Memory Lane: StyleLikeU

Revisiting the golden era of fashion blogging.

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill and decided to pop into BMV Books, a giant discount/used bookstore, to peruse whatever quirky offerings could be found in the fashion section. There were the usual suspects—Kevyn Aucoin’s Faces, Chanel picture books written for the barely literate—but one spine in particular caught my attention, opening up an invisible portal through the fabric of space and depositing me all the way back to 2010: Stylelikeu.

For anyone a) not privy to online fashion subculture circa the mid-aughts or b) under the age of 35, Stylelikeu was a fashion blog run by a mother-daughter duo who would go into the homes/apartments of fascinating people and photograph/take videos of their enviable closets. It technically still exists, but is more of a Youtube channel than a blog, and in recent years they’ve pivoted to interviewing people about their bodies as they get undressed for a series called “What’s Underneath,” which I find a little heavy-handed and not nearly as rawly inspirational as their straight-up stories about clothes.

This coffee table book, published in 2011, functions as both an accurate historical record of how extremely stylish people dressed circa 2008-2011 and as a time capsule of a bygone era that now ceases to exist. There are a number of distinctive style tribes catalogued here that remain intact only in the vestiges of my imagination. Thumbing through this book felt like stumbling upon a mud-caked Roman relic lodged in a riverbank that had been waiting to be discovered for the last two-thousand years. I invite you to gaze upon its majesty.

I have a yellow dress exactly like the one in the top right photo and maintain that it is still extremely cool.

Why is his name “Jefferttiti” and why is he wearing eyeliner that looks like that?

Illustrator Eri Wakayama had an amazing fashion blog called Mermaid Hair and was always wearing the coolest vintage Comme des Garcons outfits.

There were so many people styling themselves in this severe/sculptural Goth manner circa 2008…where are they now?!

Langley Fox Crisman aka Ernest Hemingway’s great-granddaughter and Teen Vogue nepo baby perma-muse.

The absolute jumpscare I experience opening to this page to see an indie white girl wearing an Indigenous headdress. Back when “hipster racism” was an extremely common and prevalent phenomenon.

Rachel Trachtenburg was in a family band with her parents and always had the cutest personal style. She later said that her family abused her. Incredibly sad to look back on.

I interviewed Advanced Style star Tziporah Salomon for CNN Style back in 2017 and remember her being extremely insane. Her apartment was painted entirely red, just like Diana Vreeland’s “Garden in Hell” and she did not appear to have a strong connection to reality…she was hell of a dresser though.

Fin!