Street-Style: Fashion photography, weblogs and the urban

Street-Style: Fashion photography, weblogs and the urban
image
Jess Berry
Abstract
From Norman Parkinson’s photographs of formal high fashion on the
footpaths of London to David Bailey’s snap-shots of casual chic contrasted
with the chaotic Manhattan sidewalk, since the 1950s, the street has been the
predominant backdrop for fashion photography in magazines and advertising.
Through this association fashion has become closely aligned with concepts of
modernity as linked to the urban and the everyday and as such fashion
photography of the street can be said to offer an immediacy and realism that
is contrasted with the fantasies and dreams of studio based fashion images.
This type of realism might be understood to express the so-called democracy
of fashion, where everyday people in the urban environment absorb the
rarefied vision of the designer or stylist in interpretations of fashion that are
framed by the quotidian.
Photographs of street-style are increasingly prevalent in contemporary
culture, where weblogs such as the Sartorialist and Facehunter offer diverse
fashion enthusiasts a chance to comment on what people are wearing from
Sao-Paolo to Shanghai, San Francisco to Stockholm. Street style blogs not
only act as a form of social documentary, they encourage a dialogue that
reinforces fashion of the street as a democratic arena, where the general
public, rather than models, celebrities or designers, can be at the forefront of
fashion-making.
This paper will argue that street-style blogs have absorbed the visual
language of straight photography, characterised by a full-length immediate
portrait in street situ. This format is borrowed from the pages of magazines
such as i-D and in effect provides an homogenous urban background to
contemporary fashion. The city that is represented is largely conflateable
across geographic regions, where the images of one blog appear to differ
little from another in terms of how the location is treated. While the
individual style that is represented in these blogs might suggest a rebellion
against global conformity, the similarities across cultures are also worth
noting. As such, this paper will argue that the model of an elite centre for
fashion, in Paris, London, New York or Milan is tempered by the
homogenous all-encompassing city of the Internet. The street becomes a site
of uniformity as expressed through conventional photographic formats
despite the claims to stylistic and cultural diversity that are propagated by
fashion blogs. To some degree this may represent a further democratisation
of fashion within contemporary culture, yet it might also be understood to

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threaten a flattening out of visual and cultural distinction to engender
sameness.
Key Words: Fashion cities, photography, street-style, blogs.
*****
Fashion and the city are inextricably linked where fashion is an intrinsic part
of the performance of urban life and the city itself has played an important
part in the mythologizing of fashion. Key fashion capitals, Paris, London,
New York, Milan and Tokyo have been constituted as style centres through
visual representation in magazines, advertising and film and as such hold a
powerful position in the collective imagination as to the geographical
locations of fashion. While traditional forms of fashion media have been
central to this construction it can be extrapolated that the representation of
particular cities in street-style fashion blogs contributes to this discourse.
This paper will argue that where street-style blogs differ in their
representation of fashion is in their conflation of fashion cities. Where
locations not immediately associated with fashionability are visually rendered
in the same way as the traditional fashion centres of style. The street has
become a site of uniformity constructed by the particular mode of straight-up
photography that has emerged in these blogs. It will be argued that this may
represent a further democratisation of fashion within contemporary culture
where the fashion capital has been decentralised within global fashion
networks.
1. Web 2.0 and the Decentralisation of Fashion Cities
The concept of a fashion city suggests an international metropolis at
the forefront of style. Parisian couture and its stylistic influence have long
established the French capital as the world’s fashion capital. London, New
York, Milan and Tokyo have similarly been positioned as significant centres
for style. The study of fashion cities and their role in cultural and economic
geography has become a topic of interest for fashion scholars and has been
discussed recently in Christopher Breward and David Gilbert’s edited book
Fashion’s World Cities (2006). The essays in this collection establish how
global fashion capitals have been both materially and symbolically
constructed through a complex dynamic of economic factors; such as their
position within the global marketplace, production systems; including
offshore manufacturing and local specialist networks, as well as through
cultural understandings of fashion cities represented by the cinema and
fashion press.
Gilbert draws on John Friedmann’s “world city hypothesis” to discuss
why some cities are “identified as central cites of global significance in
fashion culture” 1 based on their economic significance to the global market.

Jess Berry
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He also highlights how the major fashion cities have been historically
established,
by the urban consumer revolution…by the economic and
symbolic systems of European imperialism, by the
development of rivalries between European fashion cities,
by the growing influence of an American engagement with
European fashion, and finally by the emergence of a
distinctively modern fashion media system 2 .
While Paris, London, New York, Milan and Tokyo have remained
dominant locations within global fashion discourse new technologies and
emergent fashion cities such as Shanghai, Moscow and Jaipur threaten to
destabilise the status of the traditional fashion capitals. Many emergent
fashion cities have developed out of new middle class consumer markets in
recently industrialised countries while others have evolved out of existing
consumer markets in transformed colonial capitals. This trend indicates a
decentralisation and democratisation of fashion across global networks that
can also be witnessed in the production and consumption of fashion through
global Internet networks.
According to sociologist Manuel Castells (2002) the Internet has
fundamentally changed the spatial form of the city to include the network
society of cyberspace 3 . As Mike Featherstone explains, the data city is “a
means of construction to understand the contemporary city, the global city…
the internet as an architectural and human interactional frame in its own
right” 4 he goes on to state that “with the electronic media of a networked
world, instantaneous connections are possible which render physical spatial
differences irrelevant” 5 . Michael Ogden has a similarly optimistic view of the
data city as “multidimensional, limitless, everywhere and nowhere” available
to everyone 6 . Featherstone and Ogden’s sentiments highlight the democratic
possibilities of the Internet as a result of the geographical expansion of the
global city to include this network society. These technological and
sociological developments have resulted in significant consequences for the
fashion system.
The increased interactivity, file sharing and social networking
characteristics of Web 2.0 7 have contributed to the globalisation of fashion
production and consumption in the twenty-first century. As fashion theorist
Jennifer Craik contends, new media technology has made fashion
increasingly available to a wide spectrum of people around the globe where
the Internet’s interactive opportunities have allowed users to engage with the
fashion system through on-line shopping, digital fashion gaming, the
streaming of runway shows and discussion on social networking sites 8 . The
globalisation of the marketplace through Internet networks is also explored
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by Laird Borrelli who highlights that fashion websites “act as brand building
vehicles” and that on-line stores have redefined the shopping experience 9 .
While the impact of information technology on the fashion industry is yet to
be quantified it would seem that weblogs or blogs are of particular
significance in the decentralisation and democratisation of fashion in the
twenty-first century.
Blogs are frequently updated personal journals made available on the
Internet. Fashion blogs cover a diverse range of topics including runway
trends, celebrity lifestyles and shopping advice. They offer access to fashion
around the world and have become a major influence on the fashion industry.
Eric Wilson of the New York Times cites the presence of bloggers at fashion
events, the attraction of advertising revenue to blogspots and the recruitment
of bloggers to traditional forms of fashion media as evidence of this trend 10 .
Street-style fashion blogs such as the Sartorialist and Facehunter offer
fashion mavens a chance to comment on what people are wearing from Sao-
Paolo to Shanghai, San Francisco to Stockholm. As Yvan Rodic suggests of
his blog, Facehunter, “the internet has ended the monopoly on information
by the elite” where “a teenager in a small town in Serbia can be well
informed” and street style fashion blogs offer a system where “there is nomore
top-tier and bottom rung, no more high-fashion vs. high street” 11 .
Street-style blogs encourage a global dialogue that reinforces fashion of the
street as a democratic arena, where the general public, rather than models,
celebrities or designers, can be at the forefront of fashion making. In their
photographic coverage of emerging fashion cities, street-style blogs have also
contributed to an extension of the democratisation of fashion through the
decentralisation of elite capitals of style.
2. Fashion Photography and the Urban Image
Fashion cities have been sanctified through their representation in
films and the fashion media. The conceptualisation of dominant fashion
centres extends beyond the economic consumption of clothes where clichés
such as ‘Parisienne chic’ or ‘swinging London’ hold cultural cache. The
recent representation of New York as a fashion capital in the television show
and movie Sex and the City is an example of the discourse of style that has
grown around particular fashion capitals. Gilbert, argues that photography
can be seen to play a central role in the characterisation of fashion cities,
stating that,
The imagined cities of fashion press rhetoric become
visualised as the city is presented as a fashion object by
photography. Fashion photography has had a close
relationship with the representations of cities on postcards
and tourist guides. In both cases there is value in those

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symbols that are unambiguous identifiers of a particular
city 12 .
This observation is particularly true of fashion photography from the
1940s onwards when the street began to provide a predominant backdrop for
the dynamic action of the model. Norman Parkinson’s photographs for
Vogue during the 1940s and 1950s are a good example of Gilbert’s
characterisation of the city where iconic city skylines and monuments are
glamorous backdrops to fashion narratives. By the 1960s the idealistic
postcard images of fashion in the city had given way to a more urban
aesthetic where the gritty streetscapes captured by photographers, such as
David Bailey, demonstrated the increasing influence of youth subcultures and
high-street styles on fashion at this time.
Fashion photography of the street appropriates the dynamism of the
city to suggest an immediacy and realism that is contrasted with the fantasies
and dreams of many studio-based images. That is not to say that fashion
photography of the street does not present a desirable image of glamour, only
that this image is a more readily available experience of fashion in everyday
contexts. While Olivier Zahm argues that fashion photography is considered
“instinctively suspect of superficiality, inauthenticity and gratuitousness” 13 it
would seem that fashion photography that engages with the realism of the
street is less likely to be characterised in this way. In engaging with this
realist style, Elliott Smedley argues that, fashion photography has “stripped
bare the fantasies and the superficial ideals that the fashion industry had
formerly felt compelled to portray and disseminate” 14 . In this way the realist
image of street-style photography might be understood to express the
democracy of fashion, where everyday people in the urban environment
challenge the rarefied vision of the designer or stylist.
The influence of street-style photography on this discourse of
democratisation is worthy of consideration. Street-style fashion blogs such as
The Sartorialist and Facehunter have absorbed the visual language of
straight-up photography, characterised by a full-length immediate portrait in
street situ. Precursors to the images of street style fashion blogs can be found
in the Strictly series of photographs styled by Simon Foxton and
photographed by Jason Evans in 1991 for i-D magazine and Shoichi Aoki’s
documentation of sub-culture fashion in the Harajuku district of Tokyo for
FRUiTS magazine begun in 1997. Where images of street-style fashion differ
from other photographic representations of fashion and the city is the absence
of iconic symbols of location. In both Evan’s and Aoki’s photographs there is
little to indicate a specific urban environment. Whether it is redbrick
architecture of suburban London in the case of Evan’s images or the concrete
high-rises that are the backdrop to Aoki’s photographs in Tokyo, in both
instances the interpretation of particular location is reliant on the clothing
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worn by the subject. The English country gentry’s attire depicted in Strictly
or the distinctive sub-culture style of Harajuku illustrated in FRUiTS are the
only signs available as to the fashion city context and even these are
unreliable indicators of specific location given the global nature of style. This
is in contrast to the markers of place that Gilbert identifies as accessorising
the city in fashion photography, such as, “red buses, pillar boxes and black
cabs or water hydrants, steam vents and yellow taxis” 15 .
The city as backdrop in Evans and Aoki’s straight-up street style
photography suggests a generalised metropolis rather than a distinctive
geographic location. In the case of the street-style photography represented
on fashion blogs the absence of iconic indicators of particular fashion cities
suggests an homogenous urban background to contemporary fashion whether
the centre of style represented is Milan or Moscow. The conflated fashion
city represented in street-style blogs may in fact be an effect of the Internet’s
role in the expansion of the geography of fashionability.
3. Street Style Fashion Blogs
In surveying the images from a range of fashion blogs, including the
Sartorialist, Facehunter, Stylites, hel-looks, lookatme, Streetaholic Shanghai
and wearabout a number of similarities can be found. Perhaps the most
significant connection between these blogs, that cover both traditional
fashion capitals and emerging fashion cities, is that a diverse array of people
are represented, spanning different socio-economic groups, ages and
nationalities. One of the shared underlying strategies of these blogs is to
demonstrate how fashion is expressed in the city street rather than the
catwalk and as such they portray fashion as increasingly democratic and
accessible to people around the world. Though of course there is still an
element of exclusion when not all countries, cities and people have access to
the Internet so are not able to engage with this global fashion community.
Street-style fashion blogs illustrate the complicated and
contradictory nature of fashion trends within globalised networks. Mass
produced fashion appears ubiquitous across cultures however there are also
considerable differences in styles worn by people within the same city. As
Craik argues, there is a “tension between global zeitgeist and its propulsion
of local cultures to differentiate themselves through distinctive fashion
statements and local variants” 16 . Uma Kothari and Nina Laurie identify the
impact of globalisation on fashion suggesting that Western influence has
produced a situation where “different bodies where the same clothes” 17
within different cultural contexts and imply that issues of cultural
imperialism continue to influence the dissemination of fashion. However,
Peter Jackson, Nicola Thomas & Claire Dwyer suggest that the process of
globalisation is subject to distinct local variations. They argue that instead of

Jess Berry
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homogeneity, globalisation has created fashion hybridity and
challenges,
the essentialist view that sees cultural authenticity as the
innate property of a particular group or product…instead
that the meaning of goods is contingent on how those goods
are appropriated within specific contexts of use 18 .
The fashion depicted on street-style blogs appears to illustrate this
view to a degree. For the creator of the Facehunter blog, Yvan Rodic
“globalisation is a myth” and instead what is represented on his blog is what
he calls the “New Creole Culture” where his subjects “share a lust for the
customisation of their identities with fragments of culture from different parts
of the world” 19 . An example of this style can be seen in Rodic’s May 29,
2010 post New York –james, Crosby street, 5/10/10. Here the young man
combines different aspects of religious dress, current urban trends and subcultural
style by wearing a military style jacket, pedal pushers, Doc Martin
boots and a Sikh patka turban. It is an ensemble that demonstrates that
individual style can be established through customisation and local uses of
fashion. Globalised fashion appears in this context to be a complex mix of
global and local influences, along with traditional and modern elements.
While the individual style that is represented in these blogs might
suggest a rebellion against global conformity, similarities across cultures are
also worth noting, and are emphasised by the city acting as a unifying and
uniform backdrop to these hybrid styles. The Internet erodes the potency of
fashion capitals as geographic centres of style by offering a city that is
everywhere and nowhere. The de-centralisation of the traditional fashion city
is further compounded by the visual consistency of location constructed
through street-style blog photography that similarly renders the city as
homogenous and without distinction. Overwhelmingly these images are
notable for their lack of distinguishing landmarks. There are few visual cues
represented to suggest a particular geographical location, instead they share a
visual language of urban space that provides limited cultural context for the
fashions portrayed. Furthermore, these disparate urban spaces are not only
treated in the same way in any one blog, which would suggest the stylistic
agenda of an individual photographer, but rather share a similar aesthetic
across blogs. For example, the Sartorialist Scott Schuman’s images in Paris
are comparable to those of Nels Frye for Stylites’ photographs in Beijing. The
recurring vistas of brick walls, concrete pavements and urban streetscapes
that we see on so many of these sites provide a background closer to the
imagery of social documentary photography than to traditional fashion
formats or tourist postcards.
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Straight-up photography provides a neutral background to observe
and demarcate the diversity of street-style fashion trends however, in doing
so it relies on an homogenous image of the city constructed through the
uniformity of the photographic format. It seems contradictory for street-style
blogs with their claims to immediacy, individuality and limitlessness to
depict the city in such a consistent way as to engender a cultural sameness.
While the agenda of these blogs appears to be the celebration of the
multifarious and unique nature of global style this is in contradistinction to
the manufacturing of fashionability achieved through the way that
photography is used to render fashion capitals and non-fashion cities
identical.
4. Conclusions
This paper has argued that Street-style blogs demonstrate how the
global influences of fashion have been localised and individualised within
particular geographic locations. The homogenising effects of globalisation on
fashion styles may be less prevalent than previously thought with the
hybridisation of fashion being a more accurate reflection of consumption
within global networks. While particular styles of fashion might be
represented as unique by street-style blogs the converse is true of their
representation of fashion cities, where traditional fashion capitals are visually
represented in the same way as emergent fashion cities.
The mythology of elite fashion capitals associated with their
photographic representation has been tempered by the uniform representation
of the city in street-style blogs. The realism that street-style blogs engage
with can be seen to ‘re-socialise’ fashion outside the fantasy narratives
provided by consumer capitalism and this decentralisation of fashion might
be seen as an extension of fashion’s democracy in contemporary culture.
However, if street-style blogs have established a photographic convention
that renders the city as the everywhere and nowhere backdrop to fashion that
indicates cultural sameness, the result might be a manufacturing of style that
is devoid of narrative and individuality.

Jess Berry
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Notes
9

1 Gilbert, D ‘From Paris to Shanghai: the Changing Geographies of Fashion’s World Cities’ in C Breward and D Gibert
(eds), Fashion’s World Cities, Berg, Oxford, 2006, p. 6.
2 Gilbert, op.cit., 2006, p.19.
3 Castells, M ‘Local and Global: Cities in the Network Society’ Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Vol. 93,
No 5, 2000, p.548
4 Featherstone, M ‘The Flâneur, the City and Virtual Public Life’ Urban Studies Vol.35, No.5-6, 1998, p.910
5 ibid, p. 921.
6 Ogden, M cited in Aurigi, A Making the Digital City: the early shaping of Urban Internet space, Ashgate, London, 2005,
p.19.
7 Lindgren, S ‘From Flâneur to Web Surfer: Videoblogging photosharing and Walter Benjamin @ the Web 2.0’
Transformations, No. 15, Nov. 2007, viewed on 25 May 2010,
http://transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_15/article_10.html
8 Craik, J Fashion: the Key Concepts, Berg, Oxford, 2009, p.270.
9 Borrelli, L Net Mode: Web Fashion Now, Thames and Hudson, New York, 2002, p.6.
10 Wilson, E ‘Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row’ The New York Times, December 24, 2009, viewed on May 18, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/fashion/27BLOGGERS.html
11 Rodic, Y Facehunter, Thames & Hudson, London, 2010, p.7.
12 Gilbert, D ‘Urban Outfitting: the city and the spaces of fashion culture’ in S Bruzzi & O Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures:
Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routlegde, London, 2000, p.21.
13 Zham, O ‘On the Marked Change in Fashion Photography” in U Lehmann (ed), Chic Clicks, Hatje Cantzand The
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2000, p. T29.
14 Smedley, E ‘Escaping to Reality: Fashion photography in the 1990s’ in S Bruzzi & O Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures:
Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routlegde, London, 2000, p. 148.
15 Gilbert op.cit., 2000, p. 21.
16 Craik, op.cit., 2009, p. 301.
17 Kothari, U & Laurie, N ‘Different Bodies, same clothes: an agenda for local consumption and global identites’ Area, Vol.
37, No.2, 2005, pp.225
18 Jackson, P, Thomas, N & Dwyer, C ‘Consuming Transnational Fashion in London and Mumbai’ Geoform, Vol. 38, 2007,
p. 918.
19 Rodic op.cit., 2010, p.7.
References
Aurigi, A Making the Digital City: the early shaping of urban Internet space, Ashgate, London, 2005.
Berry, S ‘Fashion and Personalisation on the Web’ in S Bruzzi & O Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations
and Analysis, Routledge, London, 2000
Breward, C & Gilbert, D (eds.) Fashion’s World Cities, Berg, Oxford, 2006.
Borrelli, L Net Mode: Web Fashion Now, Thames and Hudson, New York, 2002.
Castells, M ‘Local and Global: Cities in the Network Society’ Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Vol.93,
No 5, 2000, pp.548-558.
Craik, J Fashion: the Key Concepts, Berg, Oxford, 2009, p.270.
Featherstone, M ‘The Flâneur, the City and Virtual Public Life’ Urban Studies Vol.35, No.5-6, 1998,p p. 909-925.
Gilbert, D ‘From Paris to Shanghai: the Changing Geographies of Fashion’s World Cities’ in C Breward and D Gibert (eds),
Fashion’s World Cities, Berg, Oxford, 2006.
Gilbert, D ‘Urban Outfitting: the city and the spaces of fashion culture’ in S Bruzzi & O Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures:
Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routlegde, London, 2000.
Jackson, P, Thomas, N & Dwyer, C ‘Consuming Transnational Fashion in London and Mumbai’ Geoform, Vol. 38, 2007, p.
908-924.

Kothari, U & Laurie, N ‘Different Bodies, same clothes: an agenda for local consumption and global identites’ Area, Vol.
37, No.2, 2005, pp.223-227
Rodic, Y Facehunter, Thames & Hudson, London, 2010.
Smedley, E ‘Escaping to Reality: Fashion photography in the 1990s’ in S Bruzzi & O Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures:
Theories, Explorations and Analysis, Routlegde, London, 2000, p. 148.
Wilson, E ‘Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row’ The New York Times, December 24, 2009, viewed on May 18, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/fashion/27BLOGGERS.html
Zham, O ‘On the Marked Change in Fashion Photography” in U Lehmann (ed), Chic Clicks, Hatje Cantz and The Institute
of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2000.
Dr Jess Berry is Lecturer in Art and Design History and Theory, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Australia.