Will the street style that triumphed more than a decade ago return?

Stockholm Street Style, Jak & Jil, Le 21ème, Face Hunter, Street Peeper o, el más conocido, The Sartorialist eran algunos de los blogs que convirtieron, hace más de una década, el street style en uno de los contenidos de moda más demandados fuera del circuito de las revistas. Una aproximación cercana y espontánea al estilo propio que se desmarcaba de la irrealidad de los editoriales y que venía a replicar la fórmula, pero en versión online, que ya había hecho famoso a Bill Cunningham desde los años 70 con sus instantáneas para el periódico The New York Times. Como ya hiciera este célebre fotógrafo, que estableció las bases de la fotografía de moda callejera, los fundadores de estos blogs –Scott Schuman, Tommy Ton, Phil Oh o Adam Katz– recorrían las calles de su ciudad en busca de personas anónimas cuya forma de vestir captara su atención. Una especie de “caza del tesoro” que se hizo mucho más sencilla cuando el escenario no era otro que las semanas de la moda.

"There was a transition from Street Style Real to Street Style of fashion weeks," explains the photographer and usual collaborator of Vogue Jonathan Daniel Pryce."The time and effort needed to find subjects as a photographer when you do Street Style‘ Real ’is high.I think many photographers passed to other genres or the professional Street Style in the fashion weeks, ”he says.The intense consumption by the public of these images and their attractiveness - the insiders posed in "the most incredible cities with the most luxurious clothes" - the rest did.Two ways to portray the own style that for Scott Schuman have nothing to do."Once the brands and magazines decided to exploit it, the street style of the fashion weeks lost all its freshness because it became a matter of quantity about quality," he says.

Schuman's experience in these lides is not little.His blog The Sartorialist was born in 2005 and was the pioneer in terms of street photography presented under this format.When asked about the last ten years of Street Style, Scott argues that he has not changed, but is Instagram that has modified the dynamics, and not only in terms of its form of consumption."Nobody wants to be" unknown. "The mystery has been lost and with him a certain dose of magic, ”he reveals.But this loss of anonymity was already coming even before the boom of this social network.With the publication of the street style of the fashion weeks in the magazines, the identification of their own heroines came: from the French editors - such as Emmanuelle Alt or Geraldine Saglio - to the one known as Russian Navy - with Miroslava Duma and Elena Perminova tohead-.

But beyond the treatment made of these photos by the media, back in 2010 the street style of the fashion weeks and the street Streetle had many more points in common than it might seem.Although on the outskirts of the parades it was easier to find fashion editors who were going to work with incredible styles - with garments bought and combined by themselves from the head to the feet -, there was still some spontaneity in all that.The arrival at Front Row of the best known egobloggers and the planning of their looks in collaboration with the luxury firms dynamited the improvised channel of the street style to date.“Finishing the decade, there was certainly a commercialization of the process.Much give and dress people to promote brands.Just before the pandemic, I saw that this began to decrease a little as the brands retired from that overexposure, ”says Jonathan Daniel Pryce.

For Scott Schuman, the loss of spontaneity of Street Style in the fashion weeks has not only had to do with the intervention of firms.“I would add that magazines have also played their role covering it and publishing it on their social networks with very little editorial information.He became Clickbait, ”he says.For Daniel Pryce, usual Street Style photographer of Vogue, that artificial element is an interesting phenomenon in itself.“I am sure that in the future we will look back, at the end of the 2010, from a particular prism, to see the success of this category of photography and the great interest of the brands to participate.It is not necessarily negative or positive, it is just a reflection of culture, ”he reveals.

Although pandemia and its consequences in the fashion weeks - of the impossibility of traveling to virtual shows - have dramatically diminished the presence of insiders and editors in fashion capitals in full period of parades, the street businessStyle was already beginning to make waters."Hundreds of photographers now go to the big parades compared to the 25 that were when Adam Katz Sinding began for the first time in 2011, saturating the market and reducing rates," Daphne Milner wrote in Business of Fashion in an article about the returnof the Street Style published last February.For Daniel Pryce there was also substantial change, even before the Covid-19 crisis."The influencers, who began to dominate the streets, were realizing that they could publish their own content without even going to the shows, so there was already a departure from the influence of the influencers," he explains.

In an article published in Vogue UK about the future of Street Style, reference is also made to that self -sufficiency that the great street stars have reached with millions of followers on Instagram.Although the prescribers no longer need these great events to publicize their style and much less to market it, this can be a good time to recover the essence of the street style of yesteryear.“If I think when I started, before it became something much bigger, relationships between photographers and subjects were really built.Now we are in a place where this has to evolve again.So, perhaps, it is an opportunity to correct the course and start documenting the style on the street in a more authentic way, ”says Street Style Tamu McPherson's photographer - known by her blog All The Pretty Birds - in this same article.

This opportunity to return from the authentic Street Style could be closely linked to distrust in the capitals of Europe and the United States and resurfaceing personal style after so many months of confinement.For sample, the street style that Vogue.com published on March 29 whose photos were taken in the McCarren Park located in the Brooklyn neighborhood.“As vaccines are distributed, the hope of a resurgence is in the air.And with reopening, there is, of course, fashion.[...] People are starting to dress again with their favorite clothes for the first spring days, ”writes Liana Satenstein.Although Scott Schuman believes that people who want to express themselves through clothing will always do it regardless of external situations, he believes that “once this pandemic ends, we will see a return (at least for a while) of the Revenge Dressing and people of the peopleReally enjoying leaving, dressing and feeling good. ”

Jonathan Daniel Pryce says that in London he has noticed how people are wearing in a way that he had not seen for years. “Even if it's just to sit in a park or take a daily walk, I can see people trying new sets or looking for looks that they had not used in a time. There is a palpable feeling that people want to express themselves again, ”he observes. The desire to dress seem to be proportional to the desire to obtain ideas from anonymous people who are going through this same rediscovery experience. Without going any further, the Instagram Madrid account in Madrid, which portrays the looks of the pedestrians of the capital anonymously (the vast majority of the images are on their backs), opened just 2 and a half months ago (at the end of January) and already has the whopping of 37 thousand followers. His co -founder Mayte Salido explains that they have no intention of labeling people or showing their faces because the essence of the account could be lost.

“The success of the account is based on the fact that, on a time when social networks show a slightly distorted reality and very thoughtful and inn photographs, Madrid in Madrid and this type of street style accounts publish a more real content,Anonymous people with whom you can feel easily identified.We also believe that the success of these accounts may be due to the lack of Street Style of the Fashion Weeks, ”explains Salido, confirming that they add up to approximately 2,000 followers a week.Although he does not believe that he is still in the Zeitgeist (as he was in the late 2000s), Jonathan Daniel Pryce also perceives that desire to see Street Style on social networks in particular.“I feel that we are now in a new phase in which the urban style is as essential as the photographs of the catwalk.It is a new perspective that feels more immediate and with which you can identify, ”he says.

For Scott Schuman the Street Style is already an intrinsic part of the media and always will be but, like everything in fashion, it will evolve and flow alongside that the changing taste of times. “The question is really: when will editorial fashion photography do something new that reflects this moment in fashion? When will the publishers excite us again and who will be the photographers who lead this new vision? ”Schuman asks. Perhaps the fact that the Street Style was born in the first instance as a tool with which to reflect the personal style establishing its own trends, regardless of brands and their commercial interests, has allowed it to be more permeable to changes. After its phagocitation by the industry, this break caused by the pandemic could serve to make tabula rasa, return visibility to anonymous fashion consumers and offer more realistic information to the public through a more authentic street style. If brands really want to know firsthand what is the real behavior of buyers, this could be a good start.

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