Virtually Fashionable

Glossy magazines and runway shows are no longer the authority on Chinese fashion. Over half of China’s 420 million netizens have a blog, creating a nation of online writers that is roughly equal to the population of Indonesia. The voice of the traditional style media has been drowned out by the click-clacking of computer keyboards as web savvy fashionistas across the country dissect the latest styles, promote new products and cover runways around the world. This month, TALK uncovers the city’s best fashion blogs.

Xiao Nini’s Sunflower Class

Fans of Taobao might already be familiar with Xiao Nini’s lifestyle blog, Sunflower Class. When she’s not moonlighting as a blogger, Nini is a trend advisor for Glamour Sales, a luxury shopping site that features discounts on over 150 designer labels, and operates a popular online Taobao store.

These industry credentials add up to make her one of China’s most influential bloggers and her scope expands far beyond fashion. Sunflower Class shows Xiao Nini as she trendsets and jetsets around the region, chowing down on noodles in Hong Kong, guest hosting TV shows in Chengdu and falling in love with Singapore’s airport. She also tests products from tea thermoses to blow dryers and doles out diet tips, but it’s the highly-stylized photos of this petite glamour girl that keep loyal readers coming back for more.

Web: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1291021104

Shanghai Style

The brainchild of Sandy Chu, an ABC with a passion for all things fashion who works at local design company Dutch Items Shanghai, Shanghai Style manages to inform and entertain expat readers about the latest fashionable goings-on in the Paris of the Orient. Chu’s designer blend of chic humour tackles topics from what those indecipherable symbols on the bottom of your shoes really mean, to the overabundance of bedazzled basics in China, not to mention a smattering of the writer’s own sketches and poetry. Shanghai Style is a definite must-read for anyone who giggles at bad Chinglish t-shirts or wants to know more about the opening of Gap.

Web: http://shanghaistyle.onsugar.com, www.disshanghai.com

Small Fry

The trend of posting pictures of your wardrobe online has been growing worldwide, and China is no stranger to this judgmental internet phenomenon. Sammy, a Shanghainese girl with a penchant for designer duds, is better known as Small Fry on Wodeyichu, or “My Wardrobe”, an online fashion community that displays the contents of closets around the Middle Kingdom. One of the most popular contributors to Wodeyichu, Sammy maintains a heavily pictorial blog that transcends language. Her cutting-edge style choices are captured around the city’s best restaurants, hotels and boutiques, and newspapers have documented how her tweets have caused a run on items in local H&Ms. Designers are taking notice of the power that this slender fashionista wields, offering her products to wear and inviting her to fashion shows in hopes that she will turn around and blog about it.

Web: www.wodeyichu.com/space/iam_smallfry

Tardeo o Temprano

Celebrity endorsements are the gold standard in Shanghai, and, traditionally, jie pai (street shots) of Western stars were the most popular way for the city’s fashionistas to get an idea of what to wear and how to wear it. Now the tide is changing and jie pai is focusing on the everyman, from the “Beggar Prince” who wowed netizens with his brand of homeless chic to the model wannabes that strut through the lanes of the French Concession. Mexican import Bere Hernandez has been publishing images of the best street fashion in Shanghai since February. Tardeo o Temprano captures Hernandez’s strolls through the city by showcasing snapshots of the stylish who walk among us. So the next time you think about heading outside in your pajamas, start thinking about who might be taking your photo when you walk out the front door.

Web: www.tardeotemprano.net