Street-Style: Fashion Photography, Weblogs and the Urban Image

Abstract

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 role in the mythologising of fashion. Through visual representation in magazines, advertising and film, the key fashion capitals, Paris, London, New York, Milan and Tokyo have been constituted as style centres. As such, they hold a powerful position in the collective imagination as 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 chapter will contend that where street-style blogs differ from traditional fashion media is that they conflate fashion cities. In these blogs, locations not immediately associated with fashionability are visually rendered in the same way as the traditional fashion centres. Specifically, the street has become a site of uniformity – constructed by a particular mode of straight-up photography that has emerged. 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.

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