Not a proper home page, but I do what I want.
My name Ryan Yip, I am a Fashion Critic and Founder of the magazine Fashion Review. I focus on the criticism of runway and also the interaction between Fashion and culture. I started this Fashion journey online with video-making. You can find my videos here on Instagram, but really, writing is where my heart is.
Towards the end of last year, the discourse around the Substack hate was very entertaining and disturbing to say the least. How did everybody turn on Substack so quickly? Then I realized it's Substack's own fault. The platform is starting to cater towards shorter content, with an algorithm like social media, things being posted there seem very fleeting, the exact opposite of what I want to achieve with my work. Of course, nothing really beats its accessibility and the ease of blogging, but the state of Substack, in my opinion, is heading towards mass appeal, and I don't want to be a part of that and inadvertently trashing the effort I put into the articles just to have them rendered obsolete by the algorithm. I don't need my 'notes' to go viral, nor do I need my newsletter to amass a million subscribers. I just want to write and post them, and I know the right person, like yourself, will make their way here.
And let's not get ahead of ourselves and start spewing bs like 'hosting your own blog is in again! Fuck Substack!' Substack has its own advantage, and they are doing amazingly. It's great that Substack, as a platform, has really kick-started a cohort of people to write again, something I deeply appreciate and admire. So let's not trash them now, it's just a disconnection of direction here.
So, Bearblog, it seems, is the next best option for me to keep blogging, writing, and opinioning. Very happy you've found your way here, and I hope that we can see this grow together.
Ryan Yip