Susie Lau is the 26-year-old Brit more commonly known as Susie Bubble who authors the blog Style Bubble. Her blog, which the New York Times reports receives 30,000 visitors each day, has made her famous in the fashion world: She appears in Gap’s latest advertising campaign, sat for a shoot with Nick Knight, and has appeared in many major magazines around the world. But even with that level of success, and genuine respect in high fashion circles (because while Lau posts pictures of herself wearing clothes on the blog, she also pounds the pavement to actually report on fashion and design), she implies she’s not rolling in it. Lau used to cover fashion for Dazed Digital, but since she left, she focuses her editorial efforts on Style Bubble. While fellow superstar fashion blogger Bryan Boy told us he makes a six-figure income, mostly from advertising on his blog, Lau suggests that’s not the case for her.
What began about five years ago as a hobby has turned into a fulfilling, though not lucrative, career. Style Bubble generates advertising, but scarcely enough, Ms. Lau said, to support her taste for Church’s English brogues. “The need to update something and feed it on a daily basis with no financial motivation sort of points to an obsessive tendency,” she said. “I think a lot of bloggers are obsessive in their ways.”
Lau, who has a degree in history, also says, “I don’t want to claim to be something that I’m not, which is a critic.” This points to one effect the Internet seems to be having on the industry: Readers seem less interested in critiques of clothes than just looking at them and enjoying them through the eyes of someone with well-defined taste. Today’s most popular fashion bloggers — Susie Lau, Bryan Boy, Fashion Toast, Tavi, Sea of Shoes — admittedly run fan sites.
