On 19 August 2008, I published my first post here. It was called How to Choose a Slimming Fabric, and it was two photographs of the same woman in two shirts. One stiff, one drapey. I asked readers to spot what else was going wrong besides the fabric.
No introduction. No “welcome to my blog”. No plan. I just started.
That was 6,574 days ago. Today Inside Out Style turns 18, which here in Australia means it can now legally buy itself a drink, vote, and move out of home. Fortunately, it shows no sign of doing any of those things.
Most blogs don’t make it to their first birthday
I went looking for research on blog survival, partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to know whether 18 years was actually unusual or whether I was just being sentimental.
It’s unusual.
Researchers at Old Dominion University tracked a sample of web addresses archived by the Wayback Machine across its first 25 years. They found the median lifespan of a web page is 2.3 years. By late 2023, only 35% of the addresses they started with were still alive. Even entire websites, meaning the whole domain rather than one page, lasted a median of about nine years.
Nine years is the middle of the distribution for a website existing at all. This one is 18.
Pew Research Centre found the same pattern from a different angle in 2024. Of the webpages that existed in 2013, 38% had simply vanished by late 2023.
Then there’s the part that’s uncomfortably specific to me. A 2026 study tracked 100 blogs that had been publicly celebrated as success stories in 2022 and checked in on them four years later. The median one had lost 85% of its search traffic. Twelve were at literal zero. And the worst hit category of the lot, at a median loss of 95%, was fashion.
I should be fair and say that last one is one blogger’s cohort study using traffic estimates rather than peer-reviewed research, and he says so himself in the write-up. But his conclusion matches what I’ve watched happen to people I know. What survived, he found, was content where the writer had actually done the thing. Recipes someone cooked. Patterns someone tested. Not descriptions that a machine can summarise in three lines.
The oldest numbers say the same thing in an older accent. When Perseus Development Corp surveyed 3,634 blogs in 2003, the outer edge of what anyone managed was 923 days. Two and a half years. The average abandoned blog lasted 126 days, and over a million were one-day wonders, posted once and never again.
There’s also a timing joke in all this. I started blogging in 2008, just as many were leaving. Pew’s numbers show 24% of online 18-to 29-year-olds were blogging in late 2007, down to 15% by 2009. Everyone was migrating to Facebook and Twitter. I was over here writing content that would stand the test of time, writing content that has become a valuable resource on a platform that I own and that is not subject to the vagaries of the “algorithm”.
The archive tells its own story. Between August 2008 and July 2026, there are 216 months. There are posts in 214 of them. The only two blanks are January 2019 and January 2023, when I took a proper Australian summer break and told you I was doing it.
Does it make me inspirational or a dinosaur? That’s up to you to decide. But I started this blog to share what I’d learned (and what I kept on learning) from clients over the years. I know that not everyone can (or wants to) come and see me for a consultation. I wanted great advice to be available for you to find (as there is so much terrible and incorrect advice out there on the internet – way more than back in 2008 when I started). And I wanted my content to be as useful in 3 years, 5 years and 10 years time as it is today which is why I teach you about principles of colour, style and wardrobing, rather than tell you to go and buy a certain garment that’s hot right now.
I love teaching you to fish, so you can fish for yourself, rather than being at the mercy of the fisherman who may not have your best interests at heart.
2008: I was just teaching you figure flattery guidelines
Here’s the uncomfortable part of going back through your own archive.
Look at what I published in that first month. How to Choose a Slimming Fabric. How to Choose Shoes to Make Your Legs Look Longer. How to Create Curves for an I-Shape Body. Best Tops to Balance Your Body. How to Broaden Your Shoulders with a Jacket.
Longer. Slimmer. Broader. Curvier. Balanced.
Every single one of those posts starts from the same unspoken assumption: that your body may have a problem to be visually corrected, and my job is to hand you the optical tricks to do it.
I want to be fair to 2008 me. It’s what I was taught in my image consultant training. And it was the kind of information that fashion magazines may have been writing as well as the stuff people were asking about (and many still are, when I look at my analytics that tell me that many find these posts still relevant). That advice wasn’t wrong, and I still teach most of it. Line, proportion and scale are real. A drapey fabric genuinely does skim where a stiff one juts. Understanding how the eye moves over an outfit is useful information, and withholding it in the name of body positivity would help nobody.
But the question underneath the advice has changed completely. In 2008, I was answering “how do I make this body more balanced?” I didn’t examine that question. I just answered it, because it was the question everyone was asking and the only one the industry had ever asked.
2013: I started asking who you wanted to be
Scroll forward five years, and the archive looks different.
By April 2013, I was publishing Who Do You Want to Be?, What’s Your Signature Style?, Asking the Question to Find Your Personal Style Statement, Is Barbie’s Body Even Possible? and Are You Looking After Yourself?
That’s not a body correction blog. That’s an identity blog.
The change had already started to happen in 2009, when I built the Absolute Colour System with 18 palettes instead of four seasons. I didn’t do that to be clever. I did it because I kept sitting in front of real women who didn’t fit any of the four boxes, and I got tired of squeezing them into the nearest wrong one. Eighteen palettes exist because human beings do not come in four or 12 flavours.
Once you accept that about colour, you can’t keep pretending it isn’t true about everything else.
2018: I got curious about what was happening in your head
By 2018, the titles had shifted again. Are You a Hunter or Gatherer When it Comes to Style? Why We All Judge Books By Their Covers and That Won’t Change. What Is Your Body Telling You About Your Wardrobe? When “Good Enough” is No Longer Good Enough For You.
Psychology had arrived, and it never left. That’s the same thread that eventually became the 16 Style Types work with Jill Chivers and Jane Kise.
I’ll be honest about the timeline though, because the archive doesn’t let me tidy it up. In that same month of 2018, I also published Where to End Tops to Make Your Hips and Tummy Look Slimmer. Nobody evolves in a straight line, and people still ask me these same sorts of questions, and since I have the answer, I share what I know. You carry the old thinking alongside the new one for years, and one day you notice you’ve stopped reaching for it so much. Plus, if you want to know that stuff, use the search tool in the header and you’ll find a post on it already written; no point in me re-writing the same information over and over.
2026: I’m writing about your nucleus accumbens
This month’s post is called How Your Brain Might Be the Cause of Your Wardrobe Woes. Last month’s were Why Clothes Never Seem to Fit or Look Good in Stores and Why You Keep Buying Clothes and Still Have Nothing to Wear.
Compare that to August 2008, and you can see the entire journey in the titles alone.
Eighteen years ago I asked how to fix your body. Now I ask what the fitting room lighting is doing to your judgement, why the sale sticker hijacks your sense of value, and why touching a garment makes you want to own it before you’ve decided whether you like it.
Working with thousands of women over these years has helped me see just how much psychology there is in your style and wardrobe, and it’s what fascinates me (and I’m hoping you find it interesting as well). Style is far from being skin deep; it’s not shallow; it’s all about identity, and identity is core to who you are. The way you present yourself tells the world so much, and it also tells yourself a lot too.
You, as the reader, will have changed in that time, just as I have changed. The clothes haven’t changed all that much, as fashion trends are circular. What changed is that I stopped treating you as the faulty component in the system.
When I started, I had black hair; now I’m a silver foxette. My kids have gone from little ones to adults who have moved out of home. I’ve gotten divorced and remarried. I used to have perfect vision, now I need glasses to read. But one thing hasn’t changed: I’m still a crazy whippet lady (as my husband likes to frequently remind me).
The 5 things 18 years actually taught me
One. The clothes were rarely the problem. In almost every wardrobe I’ve stood in front of, the real issue was a decision that hadn’t been made yet. About who she is now, what her life actually looks like, or what she’s still dressing for that ended three years ago.
Two. Rules are training wheels. I’ve written thousands of guidelines here, and I stand by them, but the point of a guideline is that you eventually understand it well enough to break it on purpose. If you’re still following my advice word for word in ten years, one of us has done something wrong.
Three. You can’t style your way out of not knowing who you are. This is why the personality work matters. Two women with identical colouring and identical body proportions will need genuinely different wardrobes, and no amount of figure flattery will paper over that gap.
Four. Consistency beats brilliance. 214 months. Most of those posts were not remarkable. Some were written on planes, some in hotel rooms, most were written at my desk, in my home studio where I do my personal stylist and image consultant training and see clients, written one-by-one. The archive isn’t the result of inspiration. It’s the result of turning up day after day, year after year.
Five: Confidence comes from action. When I started, like many, I still had a bit of imposter syndrome. What writing all these blog posts has done for me is give me confidence that I do know what I’m doing, that I have something to share and that I can help women in a positive way. In fact, having to put down onto the screen my thoughts about different topics has made me think hard; it’s made me clarify and solidify my knowledge and improved my image consulting skills hugely.
What hasn’t changed
The same thing I believed on 19 August 2008, which is that style is not a talent you’re born with. It’s a skill, it’s learnable, and the information has been deliberately kept vague by an industry that profits from your confusion.
I just know a great deal more now about why the confusion works so well.
Thank you for being here. Some of you have been reading since I first started, which is a genuinely strange and lovely thing to be able to say.
Tell me in the comments: which post here changed something for you? I’d love to know which ones landed, because that’s what tells me where to point the next 18 years.
Let’s Celebrate Turning 18 with a Present or Two for You
Because I know the value of an education in colour and style, so that you get to be the driver of your style, rather than a victim of the fashion industry and social media influence, I truly believe that investing in an ebook, a masterclass or an online program will save you time, energy, money and angst in the future (I mean, the average woman spencs something like 6 months of her life standing in front of her wardrobe trying to figure out what to wear to work.)
Your choice of Present:
$30USD off my premier online colour and style program 7 Steps to Style (it’s everything I’d do with you in a personal image consultation at a fraction of the price), plus a special bonus of my Visualise Your Style program ($27 value) included.
Or buy 2 video masterclasses and get a third free – from eyewear to outfits, from accessorising to the energy of colour, from hair and makeup to colour – the choices are yours.
Or 10% off ebooks – from packing for travel to accessorising and petite dressing tips
