All over the world are a growing group of bloggers posting pictures of “real people” as models and it’s influencing the fashion world to follow suit.

According to an article in Newsweek bloggers say their sites (Street Peeper, Last Night’s Party, Fashionista and Stylesight, to name a few) are both creating and responding to interest in street fashion. “The Look Book,” a collection of photographs of fashion-conscious New Yorkers originally published in New York Magazine, came out last September, and one of its subjects is already a star: André J., a bearded cross-dresser, graced the November cover of French Vogue. Merlin Bronques, who posts photos of trendy clubgoers on his blog, Last Night’s Party, has shot his friends for ads for Ben Sherman and Converse. Now real people are even strutting the catwalk”the swimwear company Lycra plucked 20 women of all shapes and sizes off the beach to model their suits at last year’s Miami Swim Fashion Week.

Fashion-industry folks say the trend of using real people to sell clothes attests to a fatigue with skinny, expressionless models in ads and on runways.

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