Down the street
What in the world could make companies such as Lacoste, DKNY, Topman, Condé Nast and Absolut work with untrained photographers whose only experience is shooting snaps on the street? Blame it on the rise of the street fashion blog. Usually self-taught, often using simple template software to showcase their work and not uncommonly shooting on basic digital compacts, bloggers are nonetheless causing a huge stir in the fashion world.
© The Sartorialist
The longest-established and best-known site is The Sartorialist, founded in 2005 by Scott Schuman. Schuman came from a fashion, not photography, background, and cheerfully admits he had to teach himself to shoot when he started out. ‘I didn’t want to wait for the perfect image,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to start communicating.’
He now shoots on a Canon 5D MkII, is represented by respected fashion photography agency Jed Root, and sells prints via Danziger Projects and Colette in Paris. He supplies images to GQ.com and Style.com, and his clients include Vogue Paris, British Elle, Absolut Vodka and DKNY. Condé Nast sells the ads on his site, which has more than 100,000 unique users, and Time magazine selected him as one of its Top 100 Design Infl uences in 2007. ‘I’m pretty satisfi ed with that,’ he deadpans. ‘I didn’t know it would get so big, but I thought it could if I did it right.’
Men about town
Schuman started out by heading onto New York’s street and photographing men with a strong personal style, because he was dissatisfi ed with what he saw in men’s fashion magazines. Too shy to tell his friends or fashion contacts about the project, he posted images on specialist men’s fashion forums such as Askandyaboutclothes. com, including a link to his blog. This started a groundswell of interest, which quickly grew through word-of-mouth recommendation. But it also made forx an interesting dilemma when he started shooting women. ‘
My background was in women’s fashion sales and marketing, so I couldn’t not do it,’ he says. ‘But everyone on the forums was like, “I thought this was meant to be a man’s blog”. In a way my blog is democratic because it’sx just about peoples’ imaginationx and I couldn’t care less what the brands are. But it’s also very selfish, because essentially I’m just taking pictures that I want to look at. I have a very tailored personal style that I really like, and that I don’t see represented in the magazines.’
Kit Lee, the woman behind Style Slicker, is another men’s fashion fan. ‘I tend to photograph more men than women, but it’s not on purpose,’ she says. ‘I think it’s because women follow fashion, I don’t fi nd their looks so interesting. Men don’t care so much about fashion, so they have some really quirky personal styles.’
Lee is a London-based fashion stylist assistant, and started taking photographs just for fun or to document fashion shoots. She built her site using Word Press (a basic blog template) and only recently changed to a Canon 50D, having started out on Fujifi lm and Canon digital compacts. Nevertheless, she recently started supplying images to Topman.x com, and her work has featured on She.com and in Marie Claire France. ‘It started out as a hobby,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even know that there were street fashion blogs. All I’d seen were shots in The London Paper, and I thought I could do better.’
Style tribes
Yvan Rodic, the man behind Face Hunter, started out shooting people at art openings and, unlike Schuman and Lee, has no background in fashion. ‘I started it three years ago when I was living in Paris,’ he says. ‘It didn’t even start out as a project, I just happened to get a camera and began photographing interestingx people. After a while I thought I should share these picturesx online, for people who don’t see this kind of style.’ Rodic shoots on a Canon G9 compact and has no intention of trading up, even though clients such as Absolut have started to come knocking. ‘I want to keep mobile and be able to carry my camera all day,’ he says. ‘I’m not shooting in the studio then going home for the night. Even for Absolut the idea is we’ll go to Brazil and shoot 200 people on the streets of Sao Paolo.’ German photographer Gunnar Hämmerle, meanwhile, has a slightly different approach. A trained photographer, he’s shot on DSLRs from the start, and his site is built by a software engineer (his brother). Styleclicker.net now contributes to Condé Nast’s German blogs, and Hämmerle recently shot an ad for Lacoste. ‘Me and my brother started out with the idea of doing something global linked to Google Maps,’ he says. ‘We quickly realised wex couldn’t do it because we would have to rely on contributors to upload images, and wouldn’t be able to guarantee quality. In the course of my research I’d come across The Sartorialist and Facehunter, so we decided to try something similar in Munich. It’s not known for being the most stylish place, but that just made it more of a challenge.’
Global reach
Hämmerle now includes street shots from all over the world, as do Schuman and Rodic. And, says Schuman, it’s very easy to create an international audience for your blog – after all, if you’re only including photography and a few comments, pretty much anyone, anywhere can enjoy it. Other blogs have more localised content – Lee’s styleslicker site focuses on London, while sites such as Alistair Allan’s Dirty Dirty Dancing (featured in BJP, 18 July 2007) focus on fashionsx in a particular scene. Rodic lists these sites under the moniker ‘scene style sites’, and in fact listing other street fashion blogs is common. Rather than fiercely guarding their patch, many fashion bloggers network as widely as possible, listing good blogs which show places they can’t get to. And which is the most stylish city in the world? For Lee there’s no competition. ‘London’s the most creative place for fashion,’ she says. ‘New York and Paris are much more conservative.’
Online
Gunnar Hämmerle
styleclicker.net
Kit Lee
styleslicker.wordpress.com
Yvan Rodic
facehunter.blogspot.com
Scott Schuman
thesartorialist.com
