(2) Wendy Lam’s Nitrolicious.com

Don’t be fooled by the playful name, nitrolicious.com is a site filled with the most up-to-date and sophisticated articles about fashion, culture, art, and entertainment. The writer for this blog, Wendy Lam, has been noted in Paris Vogue and Monday Magazine in Hong Kong. During Fall, Spring, or Summer RTW (Ready-to-Wear) or Fashion week, her postings are explosive including the months of January when companies begin to announce their campaign launches. Like many art and culture enthusiasts, Wendy Lam, aka retrogurl, lives in New York and bases her post around the New York/Manhattan area. However, her posts are not limited to the New York scene, but include metropolitan cities also. Her best posts are usually her thorough explanations of Target and their emergence with other higher end brands. One example is her Converse x Target collaboration:

Converse for Target

Iconic eyelet grommets and half-moon details adorn pieces in the collection, calling attention to the brand’s signature style and vintage vibe. Varsity jackets, knit jersey tanks and fitted Henleys cater to the easygoing tomboy while A-line tunics and lace-trim camisoles in flirty fabrics and subdued shades appeal to the style-conscious woman. For summer, mixing the shine of silk with matte jersey fabrics on everyday pieces creates exciting ways to dress up a weary wardrobe.

Her descriptions are well planned, using a wealth of vocabulary to explain details of the subject matter. She also puts the subjects in context of season, then proceeds to discuss fabric, design, etc. Even though my blog won’t be exclusively mentioning fashion, Lam supplies me with great up-to-date and detailed postings of her subjects that I would like to model my blog after. She also gives helpful links from her posts for me to be able to research more about the subject if I like. Also, she links to other related articles in her blog that might interest the viewer. In her most recent Stella McCartney for Adidas post, she adds multiple links at the bottom of the post that take the reader to her previous posts that mention Stella McCartney’s collaborations with clothing items for Adidas.

I believe she writes academically and professionally, considering the vocabulary she uses. Even though Lam may use blog slang like “more pics after the jump,” she still maintains a professional writing structure as if she were writing for a published magazine. She set sets a great example for bloggers to write professionally and accurately about their subject. Her great background knowledge and context of subjects makes her a credible person to reference.

Another example of her detailed post is:

Michael Jordan Air Jordan XX3

In this reading she discusses the new Air Jordan XX3’s. This item has been an ongoing collaboration with Nike and Michael Jordan and has elevated it’s status from a regular shoe, to a collectible over the past decade. Lam discusses the special features of the shoe, it’s context, a detailed description and how Nike took part of this collaboration. This is very helpful because it provides me with a structure I would like to follow for my blog. Some people may not take certain fashion collaboration or other artists collaborations serious, but her writing style and etiquette proves that it should be taken seriously. This extensive posts also displays her great blog etiquette in research to gain more credibility.

One thing I am not particularly fond of is her layout of advertisements. This makes me wonder if she writes solely about her interests or through advertisements. The layout gets confusing because there are too many links that lead to too many different pages. I think it’s a great way to organize her material, but I feel it could also be condensed to become easier to browse. At first glance, it looks like an overdone Myspace page with too many vibrant colors and distractions.

Lam also structures her most important posts much like a journalist. I believe she receives press releases from public relation companies and works her posts through the information given to her. Her audience are much the same as people who read the magazines of Vogue and other fashion magazines. Visually, the site appeals mostly toward woman, and to my knowledge would most likely interest a crowd that lives in New York City. However, I find this helpful because I find New York as the capital of commerce that is more frequently updated with art and fashion than Los Angeles. Being a native of New York, she enriches her posts with a lot of urban culture influence like sneakers and street wear brands. Lam doesn’t limit herself to only high fashion posts, but shows her well-rounded character by covering haute couture and street wear products that wouldn’t otherwise be juxtaposed in other exclusively high-fashion blogs or street wear blogs.

Her style of writing and subjects is the direction I would like to model my blog. Her writing is sophisticate yet personal to the audience. In her posts, she writes objectively about the subject, then highlights her thoughts and comments about the subject she is discussing. The difference between her blog and mine is that I would like to cover more underground artists emerging with bigger brands. Lam covers mostly women’s street wear and high fashion, but I will be covering electronics, architecture and design news. My focus would be more in the art world and seeing the development in that realm.