The year is 2006, and blogging has hit the mainstream, from fashion to food. Enter Susanna Lau, better known by her online alias, Susie Bubble, and her uber-successful fashion blog, Style Bubble. Armed with a colourful, youthful wardrobe of clashing prints, dresses with trainers and an iconic blunt fringe a la Anna Wintour, Susie’s style is still instantly recognisable today. With snappy titles like “Right Hyeres Right Now” and “Polle and Pompula Up Your Life”, Style Bubble was racking up tens of thousands of visitors by 2010.
One of the first bloggers to be invited to fashion week, Susie withstood ridicule from mainstream fashion journalists, drawing parallels to social media influencers at fashion week today. Her unique fashion sense, with a focus on then-indie designers like Molly Goddard and Simone Rocha, caught the lens of street style photographers, allowing her looks to reach an even wider audience. Susie describes her styling method in an interview with Galvan London, “I generally pile it on like a Christmas tree”, and in Red Magazine as “eclectic, haphazard and messy”, a welcomed contrast to the business casual blogger aesthetic of the 2010s. Susie has spoken openly about her struggles in the fashion industry, detailing the “bamboo ceiling” in an article for Vogue and how difficult it is to find Asian representation in fashion, especially other than Chinese or Japanese. Susie shares she’d “gone to Bond Street to attend a press day… only to be told, ‘We’re closed. This event is for press only.’”, immediately feeling “that you’re lesser than your white peers”. Susie has also publicly called out big names in the fashion industry along with early-days blogging peer Bryanboy, such as DJ Michel Gubert, for an infamous racially insensitive Instagram post. Bold and confident, Susie has never been afraid to challenge the status quo.
After the blogging boom of the early 2010s, many of Susie’s blogging peers have dropped off to pursue other careers or switch to social media influencing. Susie still works as a freelance journalist covering international fashion weeks and writing for publications such as The Guardian and Vogue. After the birth of her daughter, Susie has dedicated much of her life to motherhood, stating “I put my daughter Nico’s priorities ahead of anything” in an interview with L’Officiel. To keep up with Susie now, she is still posting her eclectic outfits to Instagram, moving away from Style Bubble and into the social media sphere.