Faceless Fashion

Daily Fashion Juice
Monday, April 18, 2011

Faceless Fashion: Torsos Hot on Teen Tumblr

The teen Fashion Tumblr scene is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Mostly images, no texts needed, no explanations on what made the owner choose this image over others, no details about the photographer or the subject, just a click through link to the source, usually another Tumblr account. An image is worth a thousand words, or rather a thousand Notes; the number of Hearts and Reblogs the post got.



For the most part, Teen fashion Tumblrs are a mixture of high fashion images from runways and magazines, fashion-like Flickr images, commonly of very thin young Caucasians, faces hidden behind their long straight hair, commercial fashion shoots featuring Asian teens in latest knock-offs and short clips from films demonstrating an almost comic ability to find that one Emo sentence even in the worst of movies ("Do you tell me lies because they sound better?" Love and other Drugs).


Flipping through enough of these posts, another characteristic becomes apparent: female torsos are big on Tumblr, sometimes not even the entire torso, just hips to belly button. Faces are of no interest and it's hard to say whether this is a fashion statement or something else. Images are pretty innocent (to the extent that fashion images of very young girls are innocent) but it's the impact of the mass of such images that awakens a slight troubling sensation. Is this a manifestation of how far deconstructing female bodies has come, or is it post deconstruction, even pure fashion perhaps? You'll need to judge for yourselves.