20.05.10
How is street fashion influencing the photography industry?
An increasing number of magazines and brands are choosing to veer away from the fantasy fashion shoot in favour of the up-front street style image. As the fashion photo bloggers make the transition from our desktop screens to our billboards, Alannah Sparks speaks to some of the key protagonists in the genre to find out why.
It’s Fashion Week, and the courtyard of London’s Somerset House is alight with a bonfire of the vanities. Stalking around on 5in heels – bags swinging, wrists jangling – is the flock of impossibly chic fashion darlings that descend on the city twice a year. Ask any one of them to pose for your camera and they will – no questions asked. You want a close-up of those McQueen shoes? No problem. Take off the glasses? You look better without them anyway. Crack a smile? Umm…perhaps not.
So why all this unusual acquiescence from the girl on the street? Why is it that every second pedestrian is entirely au fait with pulling a flattering pose? Because in the curious world of image making, the point-and-click photographers that document the tribe’s behaviour are having a fashion moment. The democratisation of fashion is nothing new. It has been well publicised that the power of the internet has allowed 13-year-old zealots from the back-end of middle America to vie with Vogue editors for front row seats at the shows. The hierarchical pyramid that once meant fashion was ruled from an elite few couture salons in Paris has been smashed up by the bloggers, and fashion has become a dialogue rather than a drill.
Photo blogs are at the centre of this new-media enlightenment. Unclouded by text, they embrace the old adage that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Their clean aesthetic and up-front approach to style on the street has made them a valuable tool for fashion editors, trend forecasters, designers and stylists.“Street style blogs are great for inspiration – after a while, you get bored looking at the same catwalk images over and over again. Street research refreshes the palette,” says Roger Tredre, editor of View Network, a subscription-only style service for brands and designers. “They are popular with magazines and bigger brands because they are ‘real’ – the true stamp of authenticity. Obviously, they’re also cheap.”
High-street designers who turn out trends at lightning speed now have access to a goldmine of fashion imagery at the click of a mouse. What once was a specialised service carried out by professionals around the world is now a free-for-all. Subscription-only trend forecasting websites such as WGSN and Trendland used to hold the monopoly on street style as an industry tool, but photographers such as Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, and Yvan Rodic of Face Hunter have disrupted the pattern with their personal blogs.
So why have they got such appeal and credibility? In the case of Schuman, his 15 years of experience in the fashion industry (he ran a showroom for designers in New York) gave him a discerning eye for style that has made him an undisputed leader in the genre. “I grew up in the industry,” says Schuman of his role as a taste maker. “I love that people are inspired by the images, and a big part of how I’ve got my eye is from working with designers and knowing what inspires them.” Consciously eschewing the too-obvious urban twenty-somethings dressed in thrift-store finds, Schuman is just as inspired by septuagenarian dandies in the Bronx as he is by the Vogue editors at Fashion Week. “There’s a difference between fashion and style,” he insists. “I’m never just shooting the clothes – I’m reacting to the swagger of a person, the way they hold themselves. Maybe the sun is falling just the right way so that anyone who steps into that spot right now is going to look really good.” The spontaneity of his images is what makes them so fresh and appealing to editors who are more accustomed to budget-busting studio fashion shoots. Jackie Dixon, a style photographer herself who has worked as a fashion editor for Vogue, Elle and InStyle, credits Schuman’s style of photography with “capturing the zeitgeist of the moment”.
“Think of Corinne Day,” she says. “Her work broke the mould and generated a whole load of similar work in the nineties. I think that this kind of street style photography is what this moment in time is all about.” Indeed, Schuman’s 70,000 daily hits, as well as his ever-increasing popularity with big name brands and magazines, would testify to this. In November 2009 Burberry released its new social media campaign entitled The Art of the Trench. Shot by Schuman, the campaign hinges on those implausibly beautiful pedestrians stumbling into sunlight, all wearing the classic trench in their own unique way. Similar campaigns have been commissioned by DKNY Jeans and luxury label Lane Crawford, to tap into the consumer’s current fetish for the seemingly ordinary person on the street.
Which leads to the question – how much of the apparent spontaneity can we actually believe? Point-and-click photography is, by its very nature, a form of reportage, so can we really accept that this beautiful person stepped into this beautiful place, right at the perfect moment – or is it just pastiche? According to Yvan Rodic, the Swiss-born voyager behind the hugely influential style blog Face Hunter, many of his images are in fact “too good to be true”. Rarely, he says, do the right person and the right location collide, and staging his shots is all part of his working process. “I’m not trying to document reality, to be a reporter,” he says of the idiosyncratic faces he captures in cities from Paris to Jakarta. “Each person I shoot, I will spend half an hour to an hour with them, getting to know them and trying to find a suitable location. I like the idea of shooting something that people expect to be reportage, but with all those elements fitting together so perfectly, it can leave the viewer just a little bit unsure.”
Citing Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra as one of his main photographic influences, Rodic has no fashion background whatsoever, working in advertising for years before he received a gift of a small digital camera in 2005 – and the rest, as they say, is history. The fact that he is drawn to inherently stylish people is just an offshoot of his fascination with faces. He works with an aim that lies closer to social anthropology than fashion photography, drawn “to the people, not the clothes”. Which is why he set up his blog – named simply Yvan Rodic – as another means to express his life and travels. This collection of abstract images, landscape shots and close-ups of his beautiful friends in the midst of their revelries, is what he deems to be his real photographic work. He says of Face Hunter: “I never thought that I was a photographer doing it, whereas the blog is much more about my photography. I practise more, I think about it more. I’m lucky, because whatever is in my diary, people tend to want to see it.”
This is the real beauty of photographic blogs – they are entirely self-directed. Schuman says quite frankly: “Let’s be honest – with the power of the new media, I don’t need magazines. If I want to shoot editorials I can just post them on my blog.” While he is consistently in commercial demand, he insists that nothing charges him up like wandering the streets looking for the perfect picture. “I love the challenge of seeing someone, chasing them, never knowing when you’re going to get the shot. It suits my personality – it’s the way I am.” This enviable independence is unique to bloggers, as they lack the financial weight that comes with publishing in print.
As Jackie Dixon puts it: “The beauty of a blog is that if you’ve got an idea and a computer and the internet, then you can just run with it.” A stylist and fashion editor, she came up with one of the better ideas the style blogosphere has seen. Show Me Your Wardrobe brings the voyeurism one step further, delving into the wardrobes and living spaces of its stylish subjects, and shooting them in their kitchens, in their pyjamas – right in the heart of their own comfort zone. “I love the street style blogs, but I just thought it was being done so well already, what was the point in trying to copy something like The Sartorialist?
“The world didn’t need another street style blog. So I thought maybe I could work around that area and just push it – get a little bit more.” Loath to be left out of the loop, Dixon had resolved to set up a blog “when bloody everyone seemed to have one” – but she resisted the temptation of running an egocentric self style blog, and chose not to unleash her “acerbic wit” via a written blog – so photography was the most viable option. Having studied fine art at Central Saint Martins, and worked around photographers for her whole career, she took to the camera with ease, and is now shooting editorials for Elle, Vogue and The Sunday Times Style, as well as working on big name campaigns that for the time being remain confidential. Does she make money from the blog? She laughs and says: “The possibilities when you have a good blog are endless – it gives people a platform they might not otherwise have had – and if you’re really lucky, then yes, it pays very well indeed.”
Those who know their cultural history will be aware that this current crop of street style catalogues are by no means an entirely original concept. Before blog culture there was i-D magazine, which was founded in 1980 as an homage to British street style. Founder Terry Jones’s so-called ‘straight-ups’ documented the whims and vagaries of the young and beautiful, spawning a range of copycat publications throughout the decade. Even before that, there was Bill Cunningham. In 1966 Cunningham began snapping fashion on New York streets using a $35 camera he’d been given as a gift. His ‘On the Street’ fashion column for The New York Times still garners a huge audience, and the enthusiastic eighty-something year old has transitioned seamlessly into modern media: his insights are now presented as a photo-montage with audio commentary on the NY Times website.
Keeping up with today’s technology is at the forefront of any blogger’s concerns. As Roger Tredre says: “These days no journalist or blogger should go anywhere without a camera – photo and video. We are all learning to be more visually literate.” Our visual literacy is becoming more accustomed to the moving image, and Yvan Rodic is ahead of the curve, having set up his Face Hunter Show in 2008. “I find it much more exciting working with the moving image. I want to work more with short films and web TV, producing cultural explorations with a video camera.” And Scott Schuman, who shoots with a Canon 5D, has also begun to experiment with it. “Everyone is beginning to learn how to deal with it. We’ll have to learn to edit in the same way we learned how to Photoshop. It’s just the way things are going now.” Right now, though, this small group of highly successful self starters are content to remain at the top of their game, churning out editorials and campaigns for a fashion industry thirsty for ‘real’ people – but, most importantly to continue feeding their own visual compulsions. As Yvan Rodic puts it: “I don’t want to be a fashion photographer; I don’t want to be a sociologist. I just want to capture my story, and assume that other people will want to see it.”
The Sartorialist by Scott Schuman is published by Penguin,
priced £19.99, ISBN 978-1846142505.
Face Hunter by Yvan Rodic is published by Thames & Hudson,
priced £14.95, ISBN 978-0500515068.
www.thesartorialist.blogspot.com
www.facehunter.blogspot.com
www.showmeyourwardrobe.blogspot.com
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