Welcome to the Racked Awards, our annual celebration of the best in fashion, beauty, shopping, and health. Below, see our nominees for the Best Wormhole Blog.
Guilty pleasures abound on the internet. You innocently pop over to the Daily Mail to look at some grainy behind-the-scenes photos from Amal's wedding, and then an hour later you find yourself passively peering at paparazzi snapshots of Miley Cyrus at a Brazilian nightclub, or Ariana Grande holding hands with a Glee actress's ex (or, more often than not, both).
But not all internet wormholes—the sites you visit "just for a second" and end up reading until 2 a.m.—will make you feel like you've lost precious minutes (or, okay, hours) of your life when you accidentally-on-purpose spend too much time on them. This year, a handful of exceptionally addictive blogs have popped up, all of which present a certain kind of content that manages to be smart and satisfying, but also entertaining and easily consumable.
Waiting for Saturday
We all count down the hours until the weekend arrives, but Nicole Benuska and Olivia Villanti were so inspired by the siren song of Saturdays that they launched a whole project devoted to downtime—and, more specifically, what we wear when we're off the clock.
Waiting for Saturday is a photo-heavy style blog that captures cool New Yorkers and industry insiders in their element: relaxing at home on a weekend morning, coffee in hand and lazy-day jeans on. There are lots of girls you'd expect to find, like blogger Lucy Laucht and CR Fashion Book's Ray Siegel, likely because both founders have a background in fashion, with Nicole working as a brand merchandiser for Eileen Fisher, and Olivia as a copy director at Madewell. But there are a lot of fresh faces too, including artists, filmmakers, and photographers you may not know but will immediately want to be best friends with.
Mrs. Sizzle
Cats have gotten a enough love from the fashion world—it's high time that man's best friend finally finds a moment in the spotlight. After spending 12 years as Glamour's executive photo director, dog lover and three-time rescue puppy adopter Suzanne Donaldson quit her job and started Mrs. Sizzle, what's surely the first-ever fashion blog about dogs and possibly the only place on the internet you'll find a "You Don't Have to Be a Hound to Wear Houndstooth" headline.
In addition to documenting the canines of industry folks like acclaimed photog Patrick Demarchelier and W beauty director Jane Larkworthy and spotlighting the chicest leashes on the market (yes, really), Donaldson writes passionately and frequently about pet adoption and rescue fundraising.
OK Real
Real talk (no pun intended): The sheer volume of sites out there profiling inspiring creatives can be a little exhausting, but OK Real does it the best and most beautifully. Started by graphic designer Amy Woodside (which explains why the branding and user experience are so lovely!), the concept behind OK Real is pretty simple. It is, generally speaking, a lifestyle guide. But to elbow it into the same corner as, say, Goop or Preserve feels unfair.
While there are general women's interest essays, the real draw of the site is a collection of in-depth interviews with exceedingly inspiring women like artist Alice Lancaster and Dimes founder Sabrina De Sousa. "A curation of wisdom for how to be who you want to be" is the mission statement, and the content is so thoughtful and, yes, curated that it would make a fantastic coffee table book (blog-to-book deals are rarely a good idea, but this one would be an excellent exception).
Valentine
These days, it's pretty much required for clothing brands to have their own dedicated blogs. Everyone from Marc Jacobs to Madewell is doing the editorial thing, but rarely does a branded blog become a destination in and of itself the way indie lingerie label Valentine's has.
Founded by former models Whitney Brown and Paloma Jonas, Valentine peddles stylish, well-made underthings for girls with smaller busts and budgets. The only thing cooler than the lace side-boob-friendly pieces they design is their part lookbook, part The Selby-style blog that snaps cool girls at home in their undies. Alongside the dreamy photography is a handwritten questionnaire that centers around romance—first loves and best pickup lines are highlights. It's intimate, addictive, and will make you realize how badly you need some new bras.
Jean Stories
Earlier this year, Florence Kane, a former fashion writer for Vogue, and Jane Herman Bishop, a former online editor at T (and whose dad just so happens to be the Ron of Ron Herman fame), teamed up to launch Jean Stories. Essentially a big love letter to denim, the site is both compulsively readable and dangerously shoppable. One minute, you'll find yourself reading about Scott Sternberg's most memorable pair of Lee jeans from 1982, and the next you're learning how many tacos the Haim sisters can eat in their favorite Levi's (between four and eight, in case you were wondering), then before you know it, you're tapping in your credit card info to purchase the very same cutoffs adored by Sleigh Bells' front lady Alexis Krauss.
Given the founders' respective pedigrees, Jean Stories received a whole lot of press on the heels of its launch, but it totally lives up to the hype. Just how it's impossible not to love jeans (and if you disagree, you just haven't found your perfect pair yet), it's impossible not to love this site.
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We love all these sites, but this year's very best is Waiting for Saturday. Anything that encourages us to spend a little more time relishing the weekend—and embracing sneakers—is worth reading. A word of warning, though: Try not to get sucked into the vortex on a Monday morning. That's just depressing, though probably not as depressing as getting lost on Dlisted.