The staging of street style
PARIS— Outside of the Chanel show, swarms of photographers snapped away at the guests as they entered the Grand Palais for a morning event. It’s a typical scene now outside of fashion shows, but of all these photographers, whose sole purpose is to document what people are wearing in Paris during fashion week, one stood out.
He had built an ad hoc photo studio set, complete with seamless white background and an assistant holding a large light reflector.
Guests were practically lining up for a chance to pose on the plain white background.
Welcome to Street Style 2.0 where the street — the very thing that gave it an unexpected, charming and natural look — has been removed from the equation.
It is one example of how this genre of shooting the imperfect public has evolved to aim for the editorial perfection of a fashion magazine.
“It serves no photographic purpose because if you want to do this kind of shoot, the studio would be the right place,” says Peter Stigter, who has been shooting the international runway shows for the past 25 years for various international magazines and newspapers, including the Toronto Star. “Fashion has become like sports — a very popular subject. Now with reality shows about fashion, everyone can experience fashion and have an opinion. It used to be very elite but now it’s also for the masses.”
The street-style phenomenon was ignited when photographers including New Yorker Scott Schuman and Toronto’s own Tommy Ton posted pictures, not of celebrities, but of the fashion editors, stylists and bloggers attending the shows during fashion weeks on their respective blogs, TheSartorialist.com and JakandJil.com.
Now most media outlets that cover fashion have entire sections dedicated to photographs of people on the street and what they are wearing. Armies of women and men, some who are not even attending the shows, just parade up and down dressed in all manner of style, from designer duds to deranged. The phenomenon has even bred street style stars. H&M is betting that one such celebrity, the eccentric fashion editor Anna Dello Russo can move merchandise.
Regularly featured on street-style blogs, she was recently hired by the global retailer to design a collection of accessories that went on sale yesterday. And photographers like Schuman and Ton have also gained recognition in the industry for their work.
After growing demands from clients, Stigter had to hire a photographer just to take these kinds of photos outside of the shows.
“Street style is a substantial part of the pictures we take,” he says. “I think it is because runway pictures have become too perfect and artificial. It is losing connection with the real world. The clothes are expensive, the models too skinny and the setting unnatural.”
Bernadette Morra, editor-in-chief of Fashion Magazine, has another reason why its popularity continues to grow.
“It’s what people are wearing now,” she says. “The runways are about what’s going to be cool in six months.”
“People want to see what the leaders — not random people — what all the top stylists that congregate at these shows are wearing,” she says, adding that the street style section on the magazine’s website is one of its more popular features. “It’s just another way of delivering information now,” she says. But there are grumblings in the industry that it has become too contrived and it is a trend that will eventually subside. “Who knows? I think it is here to stay and that it will evolve,” says Stigter.
“But it is not real anymore. Everyone dresses for this occasion, so it is staged already as we speak.” dchetty@thestar.ca