Conservative in Belief, Modern in Lifestyle: Fashion Blogging as a New Habitus for Hybrid Identities

This study conducts a visual analysis of three highly-followed conservative women’s fashion blogs in Turkey. The study asks how conservative female fashion bloggers construct their identities via visual media representations and negotiate their identities within celebrity culture in an age of extreme self-display. Based on visual discourse analysis, it examines fashion blogging as a case study of an online community centred around the use and display of fashion styles via visual representation of subjectivities. It performs critical visual analysis of selected popular fashion blogs in Turkey with respect to the questions of self-branding, publicity, and conservatism. The aim is to see how these bloggers negotiate their online identities in platforms like blogger.com and Instagram through visual materials, analysing the ways they construct their identities via Islamic fashion, through the framework of fame and visibility notions.