How Aimee Song Turned an Architecture Portfolio Into a Fashion Brand

When you think of fashion influencers, Aimee Song is typically one of the first names to pop up. 

Since the early days of social media, Song has been a prominent figure in the fashion world through her blog, Song of Style. 

What started as a simple architecture blog for her college portfolio quickly grew into a personal style brand that has lasted more than 15 years. 

Throughout her iconic career, Song has continually redefined what it means to be an influencer. 

She has written a New York Times bestselling book, launched a collection with Revolve that sold out within days, and collaborated with some of the world's biggest designer brands, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Giorgio Armani.

But Song didn't build her career from one viral moment. She built it step by step, evolving from blogger to lifestyle influencer on Instagram and turning each new opportunity into something bigger than the last.

In this Creator Spotlight, we’ll explore the rise of one of social media’s first-gen influencers and how years of adapting to an industry helped Aime Song build one of the greatest Creator brands in the fashion world. 

Song of Style Started as an Architecture Portfolio, Not a Fashion Blog

When Aimee Song launched Song of Style in 2008, becoming a fashion blogger wasn't the goal. In fact, the blog wasn't really supposed to be about fashion at all.

At the time, Song was a freshman studying interior architecture in San Francisco while balancing a full class schedule and two part-time jobs. 

Her blog, Song of Style, started as an online portfolio for her architecture work, filled with her latest interior projects and style inspirations. Every once in a while, Song would include an occasional fit check in her photos to round out the home's aesthetic. 

To her surprise, those posts started getting more attention than her design work. 

Readers weren't just interested in the spaces she was creating. They wanted to know what she was wearing, where her clothes came from, and how she put her outfits together.

Song took notice of her readers’ interest and started posting more fashion content. 

There was no big strategy behind the decision, no content calendar, and no plan to become a full-time Creator. She simply paid attention to what people responded to and gave them more of it.

It also helped that Song was getting started at a time when fashion blogging was still relatively new. Brands and traditional fashion media didn't really know what to make of bloggers yet, much less how valuable their audiences could become.

"Nobody took us seriously," Song has said about those early days. When she attended her first fashion show, she remembers sitting in the sixth row at a Betsey Johnson show surrounded by people who didn't really understand what a blogger was or why one was attending Fashion Week.

There wasn't an established roadmap for turning a blog into a career because that career barely existed yet. Song figured things out as she went, and Song of Style slowly shifted from a college portfolio into the platform that would eventually launch her fashion career.

Aimee Song Kept Her Architecture Job While Running Song of Style

Now, you might think that once a blog or social media channel takes off, a Creator will focus all their time and energy on it, right? Well, that’s not what Aimee Song did. 

Even after graduating and landing a job at an architecture firm, Song continued working while running the blog on the side. 

There were no dreams or ambitions about being a full-time blogger or Creator, because at that time, those jobs weren’t a viable career path. 

Song kept blogging because she enjoyed it, and eventually, the opportunities grew naturally around her.

With her day job at the architecture firm taking care of her financially, Song had more freedom to turn down partnerships that didn't make sense and work with companies she actually liked. 

Over time, that helped her build trust with readers because they knew she wasn't recommending a product simply because someone paid her to promote it.

Song also used these years to experiment with selling products without taking on the risk of launching a full company. 

She collaborated with brands like Gentle Monster on sunglasses and Schutz on shoes, while also testing her own graphic T-shirt line, which reportedly sold out.

These weren't massive businesses on their own, but they showed Song that the audience following her style online was also willing to buy products connected to her taste and name. 

Each small project gave her more experience with turning influence into an actual business, something that would become much more important later in her career.

Song still didn't rush to make blogging her only job. It wasn't until around three or four years before 2018 that she finally left interior design behind and became a full-time Creator, taking over Instagram and turning Song of Style into one of the most popular fashion blogs online.

She had spent years building an audience, testing partnerships, and proving Song of Style was a real business.

For Song, waiting wasn't wasted time. It gave her the freedom to build the career on her own terms and make the jump only when the opportunity was strong enough to support it.

Aimee Song Hired a Team and Expanded Song of Style Beyond the Blog

By the late 2010s, Song of Style had grown far beyond the personal fashion blog Song had started in college.

Her Instagram following passed 5 million, and as more of her audience started consuming content on their phones, Song redesigned her website with mobile users in mind. 

She also put more energy into YouTube, where she was able to transfer her blog posts into video content that gave her followers a chance to see more of her personality and everyday life. 

As her audience grew, so did the behind-the-scenes work.

What had started as a one-person operation eventually became a small team that helped build on Song’s popularity and allowed her to expand her brand.

She brought in help to manage the blog and photo posts, hired photographers for larger shoots, continued working with a longtime manager, and eventually added someone focused specifically on strategy.

More importantly, Song didn't try to handle every part of the business herself. 

She has described some of her core strengths as coming up with ideas and creative concepts as stuff that comes naturally to her, while things like organization and analytics are areas where she’s always struggled. 

So, rather than trying to become an expert at everything and take everything head-on, Song realized the value in bringing people on who could help fill those gaps.

This is a useful lesson for any Creator whose audience is starting to grow. Because building a bigger brand doesn't necessarily mean learning how to do every job yourself—sometimes, it means figuring out what you're best at and finding the right people to handle the rest.

At the same time, Song was gaining considerable recognition beyond social media. 

Her first book, Capture Your Style, became a New York Times bestseller, followed by Aimee Song: World of Style, which combined photos, travel experiences, and style tips from her life on the road.

She also earned spots on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and the Business of Fashion 500, which made her more well-known on a global scale. 

By this point, Song was no longer simply known as the woman behind a popular fashion blog. She had turned Song of Style into a much larger personal brand and established herself as a recognizable name within the fashion industry.

Song of Style's Revolve Collection Sold Out but Came With Compromises

In 2019, Song took one of her biggest steps beyond blogging and social media when she turned Song of Style into an actual clothing line.

Created with Revolve, the 50-piece collection was the retailer's first full product collaboration with an influencer and offered a variety of styles, including silk dresses, blazers, high heels, and matching sets ranging from XXS to XXL. 

The collection quickly sold out, showing that Song's followers weren't just looking to her for outfit ideas. They were willing to spend money on clothing connected directly to her style and name.

For Song, though, the partnership was about more than proving she could sell clothes. It also gave her firsthand experience with what it actually takes to run a fashion label.

Working with Revolve meant learning about everything that happens behind the scenes, from developing products to getting new collections ready for customers. 

But it also meant working within Revolve's fast-moving business model, where there's constant pressure to release new styles and keep shoppers coming back for something fresh.

And while the Song of Style line carried her name and aesthetic, it also had to appeal to Revolve's customers and fit the retailer's larger business strategy, which didn’t always reflect what Song wanted to create. 

That's an important lesson for Creators thinking about partnering with a major brand to launch their own products. Because while a partnership can really help you sell well, it will always require compromises. 

Not only are you gaining access to another company's resources, experience, and customers, but you're also building within its rules.

The Song of Style collection ultimately gave Song a chance to test whether her influence could translate into a real fashion business while learning how the industry worked from the inside. 

That experience would eventually help set the stage for Amiya, where Song could take those lessons and build a fashion label much more closely around her own vision.

Motherhood Changed How Aimee Song Thinks About Clothes and Business

As Song's career continued to skyrocket, her life away from social media was changing too, with those changes eventually influencing the kind of business she wanted to build.

Song met photographer Jacopo Moschin through the influencer and fashion world, and their relationship eventually grew into both a professional and romantic partnership. 

After a decade of being together, the couple welcomed their son Teo in 2022, and in 2023, they finally got engaged. Song has stated that she never “envisioned” herself getting engaged or married, but once they welcomed their son into the world, her understanding of the world changed, as did her ideals. 

Becoming a mother also changed the way Song thought about clothes. As she got older, she became less interested in constantly chasing whatever style was trending and more interested in buying pieces she could wear longer.

It was a noticeable change from the fast-moving side of fashion she had experienced earlier in her career. 

Rather than buying something because it was popular for the moment, Song began looking for higher-quality pieces that could "last forever" and still feel relevant years later.

Eventually, that change in her personal style started influencing how she thought about business, too. If those were the kinds of clothes she wanted to wear, why not build a brand around the same idea?

Amiya Is Aimee Song's Self-Funded Luxury Knitwear Brand, Built for the Long Run

In 2023, Song and Moschin took a very different approach to launching their next fashion venture.

After spending roughly two years developing the idea, the pair launched Amiya, a self-funded luxury knitwear brand made in Italy. 

Unlike Song's previous work with Revolve, which relied on regularly releasing new styles, Amiya was intentionally designed to move much slower.

Instead of constantly putting out new products to keep up with trends, Amiya releases smaller collections in limited quantities. 

The original plan called for around four themed drops each year, with room for an occasional collaboration when the right opportunity came along. 

Moreover, the brand’s prices also made it clear that Song was targeting a very different customer base, with pieces typically ranging from $295-$1,850 within the collection.

This is because Amiya isn't meant to be affordable, mass-market influencer merch. It's positioned as a luxury label selling higher-end pieces designed to stay in someone's closet for years rather than disappear when the next trend arrives.

Song also made an interesting decision by not making herself the face of the brand. 

After spending most of her career building Song of Style around her own image and personality, Song wanted Amiya to have an identity separate from her personal brand. 

That approach gave Amiya a better chance of becoming something bigger than another "influencer brand." 

While her audience can help introduce the company, Song’s long-term goal is for people to buy the clothing because they like Amiya itself, not simply because they follow the person who created it.

For Song, it’s a business goal that includes a lot of patience, as she hopes Amiya can eventually become her main source of income, which would allow her to rely less on sponsored content and become even more selective about the brand partnerships she accepts.

Song of Style Is Now a Substack Newsletter

More than 15 years after launching Song of Style, Aimee Song has once again changed what the name represents.

Though the blog itself no longer exists, Song has reshaped it into a Substack newsletter where she shares more personal recommendations, ideas, style inspiration, and life updates directly with readers. 

In many ways, it brings the concept back to its roots: Song sharing what she's interested in with an audience that has followed her taste for years.

There's also an important business advantage to the move. Social media Creators are always working around algorithms that decide which followers actually see their posts. 

A newsletter gives Song a much more direct way to reach the people who actively want to hear from her without depending entirely on Instagram, YouTube, or another platform to put her content in front of them.

It's a fitting next step for a Creator whose career has been built around adapting to the internet as it changes. 

Song of Style has gone from design portfolio to fashion blog, clothing line, and now a more direct editorial connection between Song and her audience.

The platform may look completely different from the blog she built her whole career on, but the basic idea hasn't changed much—share what she loves, build trust around her taste, and give people a reason to keep coming back.

What Creators Can Learn From Aimee Song: You Don't Have to Grow Overnight

Take away the Fashion Week photos, brand deals, and clothing collections, and Aimee Song's career offers a pretty simple lesson: you don't have to grow overnight to build something that lasts.

Song spent years growing Song of Style while still working in interior design. She didn't immediately quit her job when the blog started getting attention, and she didn't accept every sponsorship that came her way. 

Instead, she gave herself time to build an audience, figure out what people responded to, and work with brands that actually made sense for her.

That patience also helped her protect her audience’s trust, a thing more valuable than any follower count. 

By being selective about what she promoted, followers had more reason to believe that when Song recommended something, it was because she genuinely liked it.

Song even took a similar approach when building the business behind her name. 

She didn't hire a large team from day one. She brought people in as the business grew, particularly in areas like organization, analytics, and strategy where she knew other people could bring skills she didn't have herself.

And throughout all of those changes, she continued finding new ways to grow without simply copying whatever other Creators were doing.

That's also at the center of Song's advice for anyone trying to build a career online: find your own voice instead of trying to become the next version of someone who's already successful. 

As she has put it, "If you're trying to become like me or somebody that's already out there, it's going to be impossible... there's only one Aimee Song."