When I open a fashion magazine, there’s one section I look for first. Different titles call it different things, but it’s usually in the very front or the very back. It’s full of photos of people spotted on the street, or in clubs, wearing what they wear normally. They’ll usually be asked a few questions. How old are you? What do you do? Where did you get your clothes? What are your tastes in music, books, politics? Your heroes?
I grew up with access to hundreds of these images. The monolith chain bookstores, Borders and Barnes & Noble, landed in my suburb while I was in high school. I’d cut class to hang out in one of them and flip through all the foreign fashion magazines I couldn’t afford. It was wonderful to see what girls were wearing on the streets of Paris or London or Tokyo, and then take that inspiration to the thrift store. This was real life fashion, and I was hooked.
Until the 1980s, fashion photography came
in two forms: the standard ‘catalogue’ shoot that showed clothes on models
with a plain backdrop, or the fantastic shoot that used clothes as costumes
to suggest some otherworldly story. But, aside from pointing out the odd
object of desire, catalogue shoots were forgettable and fantastic shoots
were theatre, so removed from the experience of actually wearing clothes as
to be alienating.
Things started to change when Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin played with the
distance between the fantasy photograph and the fashion reader in the 1970s.
Their Amazonian models stared down at the viewer, as if apprehending a
voyeur, or they appeared to be dead, with empty eyes and splayed limbs. At
the same time, Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine gave models names and
voices, and used everyone from celebrities and models to clubbers and shop
assistants in fashion spreads. Of course none of that would have happened
without Billy Name. Name shot Warhol’s factory crowd with an insider’s ease.
The results look like stills from a vanished film about downtown cool. They
are poised, but unposed, and somehow even more real for being frozen in
time, their subjects plucked from the extras on the pavement and given
Name’s seal of recognition and approval.
Street style photos in their current incarnation started with i-D and later The Face, the two style bibles of the 1980s. Terry Jones, i-D’s creator, was the art director for British Vogue from 1972 to 1977. If you’ve ever had the chance to flip through a copy of Vogue from that period, or even through most of the 1980s, it’s like a chronicle of a parallel universe where fashion is a pleasant diversion from gardening or tending the Aga. Punk or New Romanticism or anything young or fun or street was represented, if at all, with scepticism and not a little distaste. In a copy of British Vogue from February 1977 – the month I was born, and one of the last months Terry Jones was art director – the one feature that stands out is a party shoot of Marisa Berenson’s wedding, with candid black and white shots of such Warhol-acolyte luminaries as Mick and Bianca Jagger and Liza Minelli. Each photo is captioned with typewriter print against a white background, a very cut-and-paste look that owes as much to punk fanzines as it does to Warhol’s Interview and Name’s work. It was a style that suggested what was to come when Jones left to found i-D, with its famous straight-ups.
The straight-ups. Part mug shot, part school photo - and part pin-up, with all the old-Hollywood glamour that implies. For people who lived and breathed fashion, walking down the King’s Road in a pair of bondage trousers and a sailor dress was all about the prospect of being discovered by i-D’s Stephen Johnson, Lana Turner-style.
The genius of i-D was its understanding of the fan’s relationship to the fanzines: the fans were fans because they wanted to be stars. It was an insight straight from Warhol and Name, who found beauty in everyone and everything: from the trannies at Max’s Kansas City to society matrons strung out on cocktails of Valium and Percodan. Before the street shoot existed, fashion could be ignored; it was a hermetically sealed world for a certain type of the rich and the beautiful. The street shoot opened the field. Some people are born to glamour, some achieve it through hard work, and others have it thrust upon them: i-D’s first stars emerged from the clubs like The Blitz and Taboo. These were people who saw clubbing as a sacred vocation, who dressed up to become immortalised as a straight-up. Years later, misguided desires for immortality of a different kind fuelled Juergen Teller’s Go-Sees project. Aspiring young models sent directly to his doorstep by their agencies were surprised to find themselves on the other side of his lens as he opened the door.
There are now entire ‘street trends’ magazines that print street shoots and nothing else. Street and Fruits, both from Japan, began in the late 1980s and are chronicles of street style all over the globe, snapped everywhere from outdoor markets to rock clubs. Fashion weeks are always prime hunting grounds for these street photographers. Outside the shows hordes of well turned-out fashion students desperately try to outdo each other, like starlets at a casting call. Every so often, one of them will be asked to step aside to be photographed. This is the holy grail. Maybe someone will ask their opinion, or take some of their aesthetic choices and filter them back into the marketplace. Influence is conferred upon the worthy. Self Service magazine, possibly the most ‘fashion’ fashion magazine on the planet, pointed this out in Benjamin Nitot’s gently mocking spreads of pictures taken during Paris fashion week – editors and buyers milling around, bored models smoking, the circus of the extravagantly dressed and non-ticketed fans on the pavement, hoping to get into the week’s best shows.
I suspect about half of these volumes are bought by ad and design agencies, and trend-forecasting companies, and the rest by obsessive and aspirant fans. But the forecasters’ days are numbered, because all of us obsessive fans couldn’t care less about them. We want to connect with each other, and bypass the marketers altogether. One of the other happy coincidences of the particular time I grew up in is that the rise of the internet coincided with my late adolescence, and the fact that I didn’t live in a big city became less and less important. Suburban streets are no longer the hinterland of even a decade ago. Photos of every catwalk show are posted online hours after the event. Instead of moving to the nearest fashion capital and waiting to be discovered, kids with digital cameras can email pictures of each other to the ‘V-mail’ page of V magazine with their contact details, likes and dislikes. They can find partners in bitching on Hintmag’s message boards, or keyword search the interest column of livejournal.com to find Margiela collectors or estate sale-hunting cronies.
The street-style fashion pages of glossies are now a conduit for fashion obsessives to meet up and compare notes, but eventually they may not need them. I’m waiting for the day when colour-photo quality printers are the standard and desktop publishing means what it says – when kids from all over the world can search each other’s street stylings online while making friends, and create their own bound and glossy magazines of link and collage. The new fashion fan networks can stand alongside the glossies, films, videos, music and the thousands of other inputs that plug into the ever-looping fashion feedback system. Until then, it’s no small comfort that these days British Vogue features a section before the back pages of serious editorial called ‘as seen’, Vogue’s insider view of trends as worn by fashion audiences. Terry Jones might have left 26 years ago, but his influence has more than returned.
Emily Bick is the Fashion Editor for contemporary