It felt like yesterday when climbing up the publishing industry’s hierarchical ladder was the only route to superseding the one and only Anna Wintour. But that was yesterday. You’ve heard of Scott Schuman’s thesartorialist.com and likely have heard of the French blogging queen, Garance Dor? – or maybe Rumi Neely’s fashiontoast.com is your cup of tea — but their celebrity and front row seat status has shaken up the editors who spent their undergraduate years fetching coffee for their associate editors before being offered an entry level job that pays as much as their office janitor. What is the result of this modernization? Fashionistas, bloggers and their MacBooks (and indirectly Steve Jobs) have become the best of friends, and the saturated fashion industry has become more competitive. Luckily, Madison’s aspiring Scott Schuman began his blog where fashion is rare.

You might have seen a preppy dressed and longhaired Asian fashionista with eyes affixed on your clothing and camera in tote from across the street. To you it might make for a momentary uncomfortable situation, but for Bill Chan, a senior majoring in marketing and risk management at UW, your style and his camera equate to art. Fashion, to say the least, is his life.

The business major was compelled by his cousin, a student in London defined by the refined British style, to start the blog last year. The origins of a fashionista from a business major likely comes across as perplexing, but Bill’s casual wear on a sunny day like this when flip flops and grey Wisconsin t-shirts are the norm, is colorful with splashes of yellow, red and bright greens, bright orange laceless Topsiders and accented by a whimsical summer scarf.

“I was really into fashion since I was small,” Chan said. “I was really picky about what I wore to school, or what I wore just to even go grocery shopping,.”

Whyneedone.blogspot.com makes for a fresh break from the mundane conforming style that Madison is notorious for. Sleeveless capes, a plethora of leather boots and stockings are some of the finds under Chan’s “Bold Italic Underline.”

“Whyneedone is just a name I’ve used since I was small,” Chan said. “The actual name of my blog is Bold Italic Underline. It’s because bold, italic and underline stuff are important in MS Word and I wanted to make fashion important as well.”

Think of it as a treasure trove of immortalized vintage finds modeled by street fashionistas for free. People willing to tackle vintage exist in the outskirts of New York and through Madison’s jungle of eyesore Longchamp, Coach and faux Vuitton. Apparently nonconformity does exist. A brand is only as fashionable as its designs.

Without a nationally established brand like Scott Schuman, Chan has encountered his fair share of unwilling participants, rejecting a photograph not on the basis of being camera shy.

“I remember one girl in Madison who rejected my photograph and walked off with her friends laughing,” Chan said. “The worst was when after I handed a man my business card, he spoke to me about my blog for five minutes before politely declining.”

Since the (not too long ago) heyday “Bold Italic Underline” was the beginning of an adventure, where along the road Chicago, Miami and Hong Kong have been a few pit stops that have made it onto the blog, capturing anyone from the elderly, homeless and street peddlers to students, couples and hipsters. But as Chan’s final days in America near, after his return to Hong Kong his blog will travel with him to the Cantonese speaking country where the majority of bloggers are fashion bloggers. It’s a daunting road to traverse in transitioning his devoted Madison audience to a new country, whose styles are the results of a m?lange of Eastern and Western influences — primarily Japan, Korea and England.

For most bloggers, blogging is a “part-time job;” a hobby to relax with after the long day of work. But Chan, with the help of his cousin, hopes to achieve what Scott Schuman — one of Time Magazine’s top 100 design influencers in America — has achieved, all the while likely pursuing a master’s degree and an eventual job in fashion merchandising. Take note. Maybe Bill Chan will someday be featured in the next Vogue column. You never know.