“In the 1990s, the street became the most relevant source for fashion – high and low,” states the ilikemystyle.net website. “Today the new street is the internet.” Interesting then that the site has now launched a print version, Ilikemystyle Quarterly, pitched as “the first user-generated fashion magazine”.

As this tagline suggests, the pan-European, A5 title gathers together content uploaded to the website by its fans, showing themselves in their favourite outfits and commenting on their clothes. Like the site the magazine also includes more traditional content, such as a still life shoot and – and this is a nice touch – spreads of spreads from other magazine, such as Vogue Italia and Paradis. “Ilikemystyle Quarterly isn’t only about street style,” state the editors. “It’s about variety, diversity, and passion.”

Elsewhere they celebrate the DIY nature of the publication, stating: “There are tons of celebrity magazines out there with photoshopped images and formulaic interviews, which is totally fine with us. We all read them. But we believe that the contributors of/people in Ilikemystyle Quarterly are highly entertaining, outrageous or just incredibly cute – and they’re real.”

They’re not the only ones picking up on the current vogue for “real” fashion, or making the transition from internet to print, just as print magazines are launching iPad-friendly versions – choice images from Scott Schuman’s site, thesartorialist.com, were published as a book by Penguin last August, and Prestel published a book of images from Yvan Rodic’s facehunter.com in February. Pick up almost any fashion magazine at the moment, and you’ll find versions of street fashion photography, close in style and feel to the images popularised by The Face and
i-D magazine in the 1980s.

But Ilikemystyle Quarterly differs from all of these titles in its reliance on amateur photography, which is used free of charge. From that point of view it’s the print equivalent of amateur stock photography, launched in a whole new market. The quality of some of them won’t keep Steve Meisel up at night, but this is also part of their charm – as the editors put it: “We like to snap pictures with our cellphones and forward them to our friends. It’s the way our world looks today: immediate, subjective and sometimes blurry”. An interesting development, and one professional photographers should keep their eye on.

Ilikemystyle Quarterly is published by Ilikemystyle Quarterly (ISBN 4-191858-912006), priced £9.50/€12. ilikemystyle.net