The First Street Style “Blog” Dates Back To 1500

Chiara Ferragni, Susie Lau, Rumi Neely and the rest of the first wave of fashion bloggers might be credited with popularizing the concept of personal style blogs, but despite pioneering the medium as a legitimate career choice, these ladies weren't actually the first to share their OOTDs with the masses. In fact, the history of fashion blogging dates back to long before the early aughts — it's actually pre-Internet. According to The  Independent, the original style blogger was a 16th-century German accountant named Matthäus Schwarz. He was so obsessed with fashion, he reportedly blew his entire salary on elaborate clothing, and commissioned local artists to paint portraits of him in his outfits. For over 40 years, he documented his favorite looks, and then bound them all together in a book called Trachtenbuch (which translates simply into "Book of Clothes"). Dubbed by historians as "the first book on fashion," the tome is currently on display in an exhibition entitled A Young Man’s Progress at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Schwarz may be missing many of the key essentials to blogging today — including designer freebies, a photographer boyfriend, and endorsement deals, not to mention a WiFi-enabled device of any sort — but the concept remains largely the same. Just replace watercolors with Instagram filters, fast-forward a couple hundred years, and you're good to go. (The Independent)