FT NEWS

Over the past few weeks, as the fashion month carousel began spinning once again with a mix of digital presentations, videos and socially distanced runway shows, there’s been a glaring omission across the usual glut of images that accompanies it: street style.

Under normal circumstances, the community of photographers, bloggers, influencers and straight-up fashion fans who power this parallel industry would be embarking on their standard four-city itinerary. But due to travel restrictions and a limited show schedule, the street-style galleries of showgoers that typically generate millions of clicks have been severely depleted.

An opportunity to correct course

The question many within the street-style community are finding themselves asking, however, is whether this shift is long overdue—and where it might be moving next. “There’s a lot of uncertainty,” says Tamu McPherson, the Milan-based photographer, editor and street-style star behind fashion blog All the Pretty Birds. “But if I think back to when I started, before it evolved into something so much bigger, you really built relationships between the photographers and the subjects. Now, we’re in a place where it has to evolve again. So maybe it’s an opportunity to correct course and start documenting style on the street in a more authentic way.”

The idea of documenting how everyday people dress is, after all, at the heart of street style. While its history arguably extends all the way back to fin-de-siècle Paris, its first moment as a genuine fashion phenomenon came courtesy of the swinging 1960s, when the Mary Quant miniskirts and shift dresses being paraded up and down London’s Carnaby Street became more influential than what was being sent down the runways. Meanwhile, from the late 1970s onwards, photographer Bill Cunningham’s candid, character-driven shots of stylish Manhattanites for The New York Times cemented the aesthetic of street-style photography and it evolved into a genre of its own.

Self-sufficient fashion icons

But it was the mid-2000s rise of a street-style set travelling around the four main fashion weeks — spearheaded by Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, Tommy Ton and Phil Oh, and accelerated by the launch of Instagram in 2010 — that saw it become its own lucrative universe, working both in tandem with, and independent of, the fashion industry at large. Drawing millions of likes every season, reflecting and dictating runway trends, and even establishing its own universe of proto-influencer celebrities, the most successful street-style stars are now self-sufficient fashion icons, raking in millions from the audience they built during those boom years.

For all the glitzy spectacle, however, McPherson notes that some of the most powerful imagery being generated by street-style photographers right now is happening far from their usual fashion week stomping grounds. Instead, they’ve been turning their lenses to their immediate surroundings during lockdown, and by doing so, returning to their roots. “The current street-style movement started from people such as Scott Schuman shooting daily, and it’s an important time to be documenting what we see on the streets—and, of course, what people are wearing,” says McPherson. “As a study in behaviour, it’s an extremely interesting time to memorialise that from a style perspective.”

Street style still has bankability

All the same, without the energy of the circus surrounding the fashion show format, it’s easy to see how many feel the unexpected magic of fashion week photography has been diluted. “Fashion needs movement, you need to be in its presence,” says designer and street-style favourite Michelle Elie, whose never-ending supply of outré Comme des Garçons looks serve as a reliable highlight for fashion week fanatics. “The whole culture of shows and presentations, I don’t think it will die out completely.”

For Elie, street style’s significance lies in the democratisation of the typically rarefied world of runway shows that its mid-2000s explosion encouraged, even if this initially came to the chagrin of some senior editors and buyers. “Outside the shows, you have hundreds of photographers from all different countries,” Elie adds. “Shooting it yourself doesn’t have the same energy or excitement. It’s not just about the fashion industry itself, as now there’s such a wide range of people who come out to see it, whether that’s kids who are fans of Kanye or Rihanna wanting to get their autograph, or people just taking in the looks. The whole culture around street style will not disappear as it’s not really about influencers, it’s about people coming together and celebrating getting dressed up.”

Still, it’s the money-making influencers who continue to drive the bankability of street style as a marketing exercise for brands—and who, despite producing street-style-inspired content of their own these days, have the ultimate responsibility to see their community evolve for the better.

For Jonathan Daniel Pryce, the photographer best known under his alias Garçon Jon, the current shift feels like one that was already overdue. “I do see street style shrinking, and that goes hand-in-hand with the conversation that was already taking place around sustainability and the environmental impact of fashion weeks,” says Pryce. “Covid-19 was just the catalyst that ignited the fire.” On another note, as Pryce points out, when operating on a smaller scale, street style is one of the most sustainable forms of fashion communication there is. “It’s just an individual on the road with a camera, so it’s a very light and easy process,” he adds.

Adapting to a wild situation

Aside from its more practical benefits, the enduring appeal of street style may lie partly in the familiarity of its now firmly established aesthetic. “There was a lot of discussion around five years ago when it felt like street style really peaked and the interest in it plateaued,” Pryce continues. “There was a fatigue around it, and people were asking when it was going to die. But to me, that’s like saying when is catwalk photography going to die? Street style has just become a new form that revolves around the fashion week circuit. There was a period in which it felt genuinely exciting, but it’s still popular, and I don’t think that’s going away.”

On this, McPherson agrees. “The pandemic has created challenges for street photographers, and they’re going to have to be creative about how they adapt to this wild situation, but it’s not dying any time soon.” While uncertainty still hangs over its future, the best route forward seems to be what made street style compelling in the first place, however obvious: documenting how people get dressed, and then how they interact and communicate through clothing, fashion week or not.

“There’s a misconception that fashion week is all about showing clothes,” Pryce says. “But fashion is a people industry, and the interactions you have during fashion week can’t be replicated through a synthetic environment such as Zoom, there just isn’t the same energy. It’s about all these amazing people from all of the world coming together, and the exchange of ideas that comes out of that.” What this landscape will look like in a year still remains uncertain, but its spirit of human interaction is clearly here to stay, even if it adopts a more subdued and responsible form. What’s the use of street style, after all, if not to reflect the times we live in?