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| Jul 06: The blog bug continues to spread across the web faster than gonorrhea in a Russian brothel, and Fashionland has not been spared. Yet style-themed blogs worth anyone's time are few and far between with 99% of bloggers' musings more verbal diarrhea than virtual diary. There are, however, some exceptions, so we decided to devote this month's surftip to not one, but two sites that should not be missed. Since it launched last October, Scott Schuman's addictive online journal The Sartorialist has made our blurry mornings a little less painful. Upon roaming the streets of Manhattan in search of well-dressed subjects to photograph, Schuman posts the portraits with a minimum of commentary, thus forming an ongoing documentation of the city's idiosyncratic sense of fashion. What sets The Sartorialist apart from similar sites (every city from Helsinki to Shanghai now has a street style blog) is its inclusive approach. Unlike its Paris counterpart, for instance, which seems infatuated with cool-clad young things bouncing at soirees, The Sartorialist is as likely to feature a dapper elderly man in Harlem as the more predictable Lower East Side hipster clone. And while The Sartorialist's tone is knowledgeable to a fault (there are entire entries about the shape of a jacket shoulder, stray hems, and dubious sock-and-trouser pairings), it's also sincere, a rarity in the snarkfest that is fashion media. Just a permalink away, the equally discerning Diane Pernet (above) also shares her fascinating world with us. No shortlist of better blogs would be complete without Pernet's pioneering cult journal, A Shaded View on Fashion. Equipped with her digital camera and a keen eye for talent, Pernet—who looks like a souped-up Duchess of Alba in perennial head-to-toe black with dark shades and a mantilla—reports on festivals, films, parties, shows and more from the global hotspots of avant-garde fashion (Hyères, Madrid, Paris, etc.) A Shaded View derives its strength from Pernet's indelible personality and from the fact that she is not an outside observer, but actually friends with the global fashion nomads that populate her blog—a tribe that includes Sikh jeweler Waris, ThreeAsFour and Turkish princesses Yaz and Emel Kurhan of the Yazbukey label. But the real beauty of any good blog is its author's dedication, and both The Sartorialist and A Shaded View are updated frequently, making them not-so-guilty pleasures throughout the day.
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