Bloggers track the young and the hip in Miami

Thompson Bennett Davis, left, and Matthew Alfonso blog about Miami street fashions at 2LiveLooks.com.

BY JAWEED KALEEM

Despite the hot and sticky weather, Matthew Alfonso has refused to wash his jeans for four months. They're skinny, dark blue dry-denim Nudies, which means there was no pre-wash and they come without built-in stress marks. The more he wears them, the more they adjust to his stride and will fade in the right spots when it's time to clean them.

''I know it sounds gross,'' he says about the $180 pair, ``but it's worth it.''

Alfonso is the head of 2 Live Looks, one of the newest websites in the Miami blogosphere. Taking their cue from popular street fashion blogs in cities like New York and London, college students Alfonso, 19, and Thompson Bennett Davis IV, 20, set out to capture Miami's young and hip outside clubs including Circa 28, PS 14, Studio A and on strips like Lincoln Road in South Beach and, occasionally, Miracle Mile in Coral Gables. Three times a week they go out to snag shots of emerging Miami trends and styles.

Since late June, their website has been updated almost daily with photos and draws 500 hits a day. For $10 they bought the rights to www.2LiveLooks.com, which redirects visitors to their free blogger-hosted site.

They have no photojournalism background and don't routinely get the names of the people they photograph with a point-and-shoot digital camera. They don't have any formal training in fashion, either. Alfonso leaves this month for his second year of classes in performance studies at Northwestern University. Davis will be a senior at Middlebury College in Vermont, studying music.

''We don't really know what high fashion is, but we do know what looks good and what's realistically do-able. We look for what everyday people are bringing to the street,'' says Alfonso, who lives in Pinecrest.

''They're people who look comfortable, but still have outfits that show style and effort,'' says Davis, also from Pinecrest.

So what's stylish in Miami?

For guys: plain, khaki shorts with upturned hems that end above the knee. For girls: simple, plain-colored dresses and high-waisted jeans. For both: skinny jeans and Panama hats.

While blogging is a hobby for Alfonso and Davis, New Yorker Scott Schuman has made a full-time job out of his website, the Sartorialist, one of the first and most popular street blogs. Started almost three years ago, the site -- full of shots from the five boroughs, plus Paris and Milan -- gets about 36,000 hits a day. Before creating it, Schuman did sales and marketing in the fashion industry for 15 years. Now, he occasionally writes for Style.com and GQ magazine and recently shot an ad for Lucky magazine.

He hasn't seen 2 Live Looks, but a few shots he took last year during Art Basel Miami Beach did make it onto his blog, he says.

''Miami is stylish, but like all places, it depends on where you hang out,'' Schuman, 39, says.

But wherever style is sparse, the 2 Live Looks crew hopes to bring some flair onto the scene. It might be working. Alesh Houdek, a 33-year-old graphic designer from Miami Beach, says he reads the blog almost every day.

''I've sort of found myself paying more attention to what I wear. I've changed the way I put things together,'' he says. ''I've read other fashion blogs in the past, but it wasn't until it was in Miami that it really seemed relevant to me.'' Houdek isn't foreign to the blog world. In his spare time, he runs CriticalMiami.com, one of the most popular Miami-based blogs.

Alfonso and Davis return to college soon, but they plan on continuing the blog from schools. Their friend Sarah Attias, who currently contributes to the site, will take over as a Miami photographer when they're gone. And they're hoping to recruit a few more contributors for the site.

For now, Alfonso is still sweatin' the Nudies, which he recently featured on the site when he photographed a man who had an unwashed 7 ½-month-old pair. Perhaps his will be cleaned in November, he says.