fashion : the wiles of street style
Seeing Bill Cunningham New York recently really got me thinking about what has become of street style over the past few years. Here is an 80+ year old man who takes photos for the New York Times style pages, as he has for decades. He rides his bike in his bright blue poncho (known as his uniform), snaps away at shoes and skirts, and goes home to his tiny apartment in Carnegie Hall which houses only filing cabinets and a small bed. That is literally it. And it is an absolutely wonderful sight to behold all the way through this fabulous (and at times quite moving) documentary.
The film doesn’t quite touch on developments in new media (specifically fashion and street style blogs which have blown up and become genres in their own right) which is a shame, though completely understandable. After all, this man doesn’t give a damn about much beyond maintaining the quality of his own work, why would he be reading The Sartorialist? But for me, someone who has enjoyed seeing street style from all over the world through bloggers’ posts for years, the comparison was obvious, and brought up a range of issues relating to fashion and its various forms of intersectionality in today’s western world.
Popular street style blogs such as Garance Doré are wonderful visual stimuli, certainly. But there are some real issues here. So many blogs are becoming increasingly white-washed, and non-inclusive of any body types beyond the lithe population. Additionally, the bar for income earning for those photographed, and thus possible expenditure, is ever-high. Some allowances should be made for certain niche blogs, and rightly are (Jak & Jil and Altamira NYC spring to mind, which focus on fashion weeks or related events, therefore models and eccentrically dressed fashion editors are the main features). However the majority seem to stray into a tired cycle of the rich watching the rich. There are only so many times I can see Anna della Russo looking like a walking editorial, you know? It goes without saying that she’s fabulously bold, but she’s in a different world to the rest of us who don’t have access to or the body for Vogue Nippon samples. And isn’t that the whole point of street style in the first place? Looking at how normal people are wearing what on the streets? Few street style blogs have upheld this basic standard.
Casting a wider net to fashion blogs as a whole, this trend (no pun intended) remains. Many bloggers have extended their repertoire into quasi-modelling photoshoots, plugging various products sent to them, and alienating their original audience in removing all realism that was once there from their posts. There are ways to grow personally, professionally and financially as a blogger while remaining true to ‘brand’ (Keiko Lynn, for instance, does a wonderful job of this).
Now I’m not saying that all street style photographers should become reclusive and live in tiny flats with nothing but their lifetime of negatives surrounding them. Not at all. But Cunningham is the purest embodiment of the street style genre – talent, an undiscriminating eye and above all, passion for clothes and accessories. Unphased by technology, celebrity and any form of pretension, he is the apex of street style photography, and an unrivalled photojournalist who is truly the best example to learn from.
By Katie Hryce
