Friend Friday...

Welcome to this week's edition of Friend Fridays, sponsored by ModlyChic.

1. As a someone who writes/blogs about fashion, have you placed
yourself into some sort of blogging category?

I actually don't consider myself so much a fashion blogger as a personal style blogger. I think fashion bloggers actually follow the world of fashion, trends, runways, brands, couture, etc. I don't follow any of that. I may pick up on what's trendy from the blogs I read or the people I see, but that's about the extent of it. However, I have always reserved the right to blog about anything that catches my interest, so long as it is related to the world of fashion and style.

2. What keeps you from or encourages you to label yourself as a
certain kind of blogger?

While labels are useful tools to help describe yourself, your outlook, or your blog, they also serve the dual purpose of putting you in a box. Once you label yourself a certain way and present yourself that way to people, it becomes more difficult to do or present something different. Too often, people become trapped inside the box and can't find a way out.

3. When picking blogs to read and follow are you drawn to ones that
indicate a certain group or way of thinking/being?

Yes and No. There probably is a certain theme I am most drawn to in the blogs I read, but I don't actively seek out blogs that say/do/show something specific (ie "I will only read blogs about thrifting" or "I will never read blogs if they participate in the 30x30"). My decision to read a blog is based on a multitude of different criteria, most of them subconscious.

4. Do you think there are benefits in labeling yourself or others?

As I said before, labeling does have the benefit of helping to more quickly identify things. If I know someone is a daily style blogger who likes to thrift and remix, I have an idea of what their blog is like, and I know I would be more likely to be interested in that blog than, say, a blog that is all about high fashion.
However, those labels alone won't keep me reading a blog. And certain labels may turn me off of reading a blog that, otherwise, I may actually have been interested in, had the label not lost my interest.

5. Agree or Disagree -- We're all just people; we don't need all the
labels.

At the heart of that statement, I agree.
However, I think we, as people, have a certain need to qualify things. We want to know what is similar and what is different. We want to be able to quickly identify things, and thus, labeling happens, even if we don't want it to.

I think what we really need to do is to understand that while we may throw a label on something (or someone), that label is not the end-all be-all definition. People aren't black-and-white -- we are much more complex and there are so many subtleties that it is such a shame to not explore further. Further, people change! We grow and evolve, and if you've thrown a label on me in the past, you may not see who I am today.

So I guess what I'm saying is, sure, feel free to write a label on my forehead, but do it in pencil, not permanent ink.