Interview: Cait Harrington, fashion expert and blogger

This week, however, she’s too busy to update her Wayward Daughter website and is to be found sitting on a toolbox dressed ina pair of wellies, distressed jeans and her photographer fiancé Adam Wilson’s old plaid shirt as the couple renovate their new flat in Edinburgh. “We’re a month in and it’s much harder than I imagined.

“It’s a Victorian flat we’re taking back to basics. I’ve taken out modern fireplaces with a sledgehammer, we’ve replaced the electrics and re-plastered. I was going to blog all the way through but underestimated how impossible that would be. We’re working every day along with the tradesmen, from dawn to dusk,” says the 26-year-old.

“My life is enveloped in blogging but it has taken a back seat just now. I feel bad because it’s like a child I’m neglecting,” she says of the site, which is named after the French ballet La Fille Mal Gardée.

Nominated for three style blogger awards in Company magazine and noted on Teenvogue.com, Harrington’s blog features mostly personal style, with a little lifestyle, make-up tutorials and a regular Edinburgh guide which she hopes to publish as a separate feed in the near future. Completely self-taught by trial and error, she has blogged regularly for the past 18 months and now has a growing readership of 60,000 a month. “I started blogging for fun when I was studying four years ago then after graduation it started to grow and I began thinking of it as a career and making money from it.

“It’s only become possible for people to advertise on websites in the last couple of years and make money through it,” she says. “The blog was just an online diary of what I wore in the beginning and then it just took on its own life. Now I split my time between blogging and my clothes line.”

When she’s not online, Harrington gets busy with the needle for her hand-crafted clothing label, also named Wayward Daughter, which currently features a range of cute dresses in Liberty’s Tana Lawn textiles. It was these that caught the eye of the owner of the Audrey Grace Boutiques in Jackson, Mississippi, and New York, and landed her an order to create a number of pieces.

Harrington chose to study theatre costume at Edinburgh’s Telford College rather than fashion because she wanted to learn traditional tailoring techniques. “I didn’t want to work for a fashion line. I wanted to do it for myself and learn clothes-making skills.

“I focused heavily on corsetry and clothing, studying the history and construction of costume from Elizabethan to Victorian, which is a great education to have when you’re designing with a vintage feel.”

Harrington is one of a wave of young bloggers who have come in from the furthest reaches of the web to find themselves seated front row at Fashion Week as the style world opens up to anyone with a sense of style and a laptop.

“I like Carrie Harwood of wishwishwish.net and Erin Perez Hagstrom of www.calivintage.com, plus the www.thecherryblossomgirl.com for style blogs and www.louder thansilence.com, which is a lifestyle blog too,” she says.

“Things are out of date in 24 hours. Also, style blogs are a snippet into somebody else’s life, on another side of the world in another culture, more about the person than trends. I’m not interested in the latest fashion because that’s boring. The first thing I do in the morning and last thing at night is check my favourite blogs. Blogging is normal to me. It’s what I do.”

And with that, she picks up her sledgehammer and cracks on with the demolition, because while normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, for the next few days Harrington’s life is more slog than blog.