In March 2020, blogger Jillian Owens was flying high. She had just made a major transition in her life thanks to an unexpected change at her day job. When she wasn’t publishing online, Owens paid the bills with marketing work. Unfortunately, her company didn’t hesitate to let her go when they fell on hard times at the start of the pandemic.
Rather than take it as a setback to her career, Owens thought the new situation could be a boon for Refashionista, her then-ten-year-old blog and newsletter, which already had tens of thousands of followers. “I’m very confident I can make the blog work,” she told me in an interview over Skype at the time. “I’m ready to go full-time. I’ve worked really hard on this, and I think it’s there.”
But Owens never got to grow into her role as a full-time blogger or create the online course of her dreams. Only weeks after our big interview, she got devastating news: She had a tumor in her ovaries. And it was growing.
The ‘Private’ Thoughts of Online Writers
Mortality and its expression online changed over the years: Early creators are now older, not publishing, or even dead, leaving their work and their fans behind. As all of us live more of our lives on the internet, we have to face this reality more and more, not only as protagonists but as bystanders.
My relationship with Owens and Refashionista was full-on parasocial love — an intimate, if one-sided, relationship. I read all her blogs and newsletters, I knew where she lived and how she spent her weekends, and I even knew her dog’s name.
I talked with Dara Greenwood, associate professor of psychological science and director of media studies at Vassar University, about this phenomenon. Writing online “might have the potential to engender a high level of intimacy,” she told me, even beyond the carefully cultivated sense of connection built on social media. This happens because of “the personal diary-style format and access to ostensibly ‘private’ thoughts, feelings, and experiences.”
The deeply personal lives of the first wave of mommy blog writers in the early aughts grew to include once-taboo topics like divorce or death. Their dirty laundry inevitably came up as their creators aged. Rebecca Woolf, the author of Girl’s Gone Child, shared not only her husband’s sudden passing but photos of her children digging a hole for his ashes. Death comes for us all, and the internet very rarely forgets. The grief it creates is very real.
Sites like Facebook and Instagram, both owned by parent company Meta, offer memorial accounts. A death is reported, then followers leave mournful comments that sit in that digital space for years. Newsletter creators, like those early bloggers, will eventually need to navigate personal crises in the background of their content production. We all have to make the editorial choice as to how much of ourselves to reveal.
The Refashionista’s Rise
Owens’s journey to online fame started back in 2009. She was a typical young writer — always thinking of ways to create and save money. She had a deep love for the thrift stores of her new city of Columbia, South Carolina. She loved to go to second-hand stores, find something indisputably ugly, then take it home and make it look gorgeous with a few quick alterations and a dye job.
When I interviewed her in 2020, she told me, “Starting a new outfit from a thrift store find is so much easier than starting from scratch. I would wear a refashioned piece and people would say, ‘Holy cow! Where’d you get that?’ I explained that I’d made it. Soon everyone was saying, ‘You should start a blog.’ ”
She took that advice and began sharing her process. She used an image-heavy format to show how each piece started (stained, poorly made, and generally hideous), then how she gave it a makeover. Graduation gowns became party dresses, ugly printed nightgowns became cute T-shirts, and truly awful pleated dresses from the ‘80s became works of art.
“I kind of have a thing for just how unwanted (ugly clothes) are,” she once told a reporter. “There’s no good future for them unless I intervene.”
More than anything, Owens put her personality into each piece. She never hesitated to model an ugly piece of clothing in its original state, point to any suspicious stains, or add patches with a horrified face directed right at the camera. Every photo came with its own silly cut line, like “a little black mess” under a ridiculous black dress or a simple “WHIRRRRRR” under a shot of her sewing machine at work.
I can’t recall how I stumbled across and then found myself devoted to a sewing newsletter. I’m useless with a sewing machine and barely know my way around a fabric store. But I spent hours with friends in my hometown Goodwill and digging through my grandmother’s closet, marveling at the prints and fabrics that were once en vogue. Something about Owens’s love of second-hand clothing drew me in. Her artistry encouraged me to stay.
I wasn’t alone. Fans from all over the world started finding and sharing her blog posts, then signed up for her newsletter by the thousands. Owens used her platform to feature one project at a time and break down how each look came together. She also wasn’t afraid to share intimate details about herself along the way, even heartbreak.
She started the blog engaged, only to then break up with her fiancé and share her pain with readers. A couple of years on, as she met a man, Brian Morris, who eventually became her husband, readers got a peek at their love story and cheered when it culminated in a true match.
Eventually, her blog and newsletter caught the world’s attention. Interviews with The Refashionista popped up on BuzzFeed and Bored Panda then in some major magazines. Both Elle and Cosmopolitan featured her in their French publications, showing off her incredible styling skills. Each made sure to mention that she focused on particularly ugly, cheap, forgotten pieces and let readers marvel at the level of transformation Owens achieved in each outfit.
I can’t recall how I stumbled across and then found myself devoted to a sewing newsletter. I’m useless with a sewing machine and barely know my way around a fabric store.
In 2014, Owens’s local paper, The State, contacted her for a holiday refashion involving sweaters; she ran with the idea. She walked readers step by step through the process of turning six truly cheesy, holiday sweaters into a gorgeous, reindeer-and-gingerbread-man-themed ball gown.
“I unpicked the bodice of a dress I liked the fit of (but that was worn-out) and used it as a template for the bodice of my new dress,” Owens wrote. “Then, I traced the skirt part of another dress I really liked to make a pattern for the bottom of my new dress.”
But for me, the best part was opening her newsletter to find a photo of the local paper, with Jillian dressed on the front page in a surprisingly gorgeous ballgown of sweaters.
After the articles came several TV appearances. The Rachael Ray Show, Good Morning America, and Good Afternoon America all wanted a moment with The Refashionista. The last two even challenged her to refashion something the same day she appeared, once for a reporter and the second time for an audience member.
Owens had every reason to believe she was on her way to a long, illustrious career. She had the following, a massive email list, and passion. She even added a good cause to her brand, donating each creation to the thrift store Revente’s Second Chances, which then used the proceeds to help a nearby women’s shelter.
The cancer diagnosis threw a massive wrench into her career trajectory. But rather than hide her most vulnerable moment, Owens, like so many other authors online, used the diagnosis to connect with her fans in a new way: As a woman managing an illness.
Owens shared every moment of her cancer journey. On her blog, which is still live as of publication, there’s a section labeled Ovarian Cancer & Me, where readers can do a deep dive into the major change in her life, from diagnosis to the last report from her doctor.
But the choice to share those things can turn a terrifying experience into a living work of art. Morris, Owens’s widower, talked to me via email about his late wife’s experience with her fans after she got sick.
“I really think the engagement [Owens] got from her readers after being diagnosed really lifted her spirits,” Morris said. “She was always amazed that anyone took the time to read her blog. The outpouring of love and hope that she got from people really encouraged her to continue writing.”
When cancer became a part of Owens’s life, she didn’t hold back. “Ovarian cancer is often called a silent killer,” Morris explained, “and she wanted to raise awareness of this disease to anyone that she could.”
Owens kept me and my fellow subscribers up to date on her latest projects and her cancer treatments. On January 7, 2021, she wrote about how it felt to get the all-clear from her doctor. For some reason, she didn’t feel happy but rather shaken by the news that her cancer was in remission.
“When I got the news,” she wrote, “I responded with a slightly dull ‘That’s wonderful.’ I feel like I should have acted happier. Brian and I quietly left the oncology center, hands still held tight, and collapsed into each other’s arms in the parking lot. It was over.”
She photographed herself out on the coast with her husband as she recuperated from the last of the chemotherapy’s side effects and tried to go back to business as usual. But every post after showed a thinner, more frail Owens, often held up by a nearby railing or her loving husband.
The Last Newsletter
In July 2021, with her usual smile and upbeat approach, Owens explained that her cancer was back. “My ovarian cancer has metastasized to my lungs, which means I’m now in Stage 4,” she wrote. She went on to explain that her extreme fatigue made keeping up with daily tasks nearly impossible. Her post ended with a request that her readers be patient and bear with her as she dealt with this new, much scarier phase of her illness.
I waited and waited for the next issue of her newsletter, but it never arrived. On October 11, 2021, Owens passed away. She was 39.
There was no official announcement on her blog or newsletter, but I knew even before I searched for her name plus the word “obituary.” The top result confirmed my deepest fear — Owens had passed away. To my shock, I mourned her even from a distance. Our parasocial relationship was enough to make me feel real grief over her demise.
In retrospect, it feels incredible that Owens would take the risk of dying in front of her readers. As someone who documented her life in such an open, honest way, she must have known that was a possibility.
The Refashionista blog still gets traffic today. Owens’s tutorials are there for anyone who wants to do a refashion of their own and make something beautiful out of something forgotten. Like me, a lot of her readers use the comments section or Owens’s former Facebook page to let her survivors know how much she meant to them. Wrote one fan, Karen G.:
“No, no, no! I didn’t know our dear Owens had died. I suspected it but was afraid to look. Damn, what a loss to her friends, loved ones, her lovely husband, and those of us who never met, but adored her. RIP sweet Refashionista <3”
A fellow reader, who declined to put her name on her comment, wrote under Owens’s final post:
“That article brought tears to my eyes. I never met Owens but so wish I would have. I miss her very much.”
“At the end of the day, it would be surprising if regular readers did not feel some sense of personal loss when an author dies,” Greenwood told me, “particularly if it is unexpected or shocking. Readers may also experience a loss of the pleasure of engaging with the content that the creator has been providing, on top of the loss of the person themselves.”
Greenwood thinks we need a better word than “parasocial” for this sort of relationship. Readers or followers may get a direct response to a comment or an email straight from the creator they love. In the event of a death or ending, readers don’t lose just a weekly post — they lose part of their ritual that helped them feel supported and centered.
That’s on top of the fact that readers can still see photos, final posts, and old emails from the creators who shared those digital diary entries with their readers. Those don’t disappear.
I visit Owens’s blog from time to time, but I tend to stick to the older, pre-diagnosis posts. They remind me to cherish every day, to not take anyone for granted. Sometimes even young, healthy people leave us suddenly, and we might not even get to say goodbye. When I see posts from three or four years ago, that moment when Owens had really found her stride, I feel so connected to her through the screen. I can almost hear her in those pictures asking for my opinion on her latest creation as she smiles at the camera: “What do you think?”
And I always tell her, “It’s perfect.”
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