The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that personality is making a fashion comeback just now, after years of Eastern Brazilopean clones on the runway and in the magazines.You've noticed: Lindy, Christy, Claudia, Naomi, Cindy, et. al., are back and booking up all the glossy paper stock available.
And there's been a renewed focus in the online and print media on identifying the current crop of models as individuals. Even if sometimes that noble sentiment backfires.
Maybe it's a reaction to the anonymized sameishness of much of the fashion imagery of the early oughts; maybe it's an inevitable response to the tedium of featureless plasticine airbrushing.
Whatever the reason, it's hard not to notice the interest: the Met Costume Institute gala this year is themed "The Model As Muse," privileging an unusually model-centric understanding of fashion's workings. 
There was Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me. A little more light-hearted is Modelinia, a recent web start-up dedicated to the idea that people want to read (and Maybelline advertising can be sold around) content about models — everyday models who aren't bold-faced names, models
who book the Dior makeup test, not the Dior show — and that those readers care enough to wonder what we do in our off hours and if we have any tips on where to buy good vintage clothes. (Eating, drinking, and reading, and the Hell's Kitchen Salvation Army, as though that's any great secret, thanks for asking.) And then there's ModelFeed, a group-blogging platform out of Australia that boasts a bevvy of (predominantly)
Aussie model contributors; who knows how that site plans to
monetize itself, but for now, its only too happy to lend its bandwidth to former band geek Sarah Stephens' old school photos, and Kieta van Ewyk's many practical uses for rain boots on the family farm.
If those last two of the above betray, at least in theory, allegiance to the idea that models merit acknowledgment as agents, and not just as subjects — that the young women who are seen and not heard deserve a shot at a voice, and the Internet is the perfect venue to provide it — then they also, unfortunately, have a whiff of artificiality about them. We don't actually know anything more about Stephens for having seen
her band picture or for knowing that she gets lonely sometimes in Paris; despite the tagline "Not Made Up", this is some mediated content.(The girls' agencies are in on the ModelFeed action.) Modelinia occasionally veers into night-time Tyra territory. (If cinema truth at 24 frames a second, what is web video? Inanity at broadband speed?)
There's something a little corporate, a little astroturf-y, about it all.
Not so models' independent, personal blogs, of which there are too many to list.
Quality does vary; some of my tribe are simply out-and-out crazypants, and plenty are very keen on making the gig-to-gig life lived in tiny apartments split five ways sound extraordinarily
glamorous indeed. (It is not.) More frequently, especially with bigger-name models, personal blogs wither to little more than vehicles for self-promotion.
(It's hard to take too much of Sessilee Lopez's oddly flat blog, which might as well be titled, The Various High Heights Of My Fabulous Career Being Fabulous, So Far.)
But for every Shannon Stewart ("The Lord Jesus just allowed me to get an agency in Miami, Paris, Munich (Germany),
and I am in the process of getting one in Hambourg [sic] !!! Praise the LORD!! haha") there's an Elyse Sewell, making her mark behind the scenes with wit and verve. Below, my picks of five of the "model blogs" that are actually worth taking a look at.
Elyse Sewell
Elyse Sewell
