People in Fashionable Clothes: Street Style Blogs and the Ontology of the Fashion Photograph

Abstract

This article begins with a long-lens view of the street style blog to see where it fits in the broader frame of fashion photography. From a starting point of uncertainty, the article investigates whether images on street style blogs are indeed fashion photographs or simply, to use Nancy Hall-Duncan’s term, “fashion gesture.” It then follows a path that traces the commercial imperative of the fashion photograph and unfolds how this operates in one of the most successful—and earliest—iterations of the street style blog, Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist. It does this via one of its “particularities”—the interactive contributions of user-viewers on the comment roll. Described as a “living fabric” by Schuman, this interactive commentary mirrors Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment—image clothing and written clothing. An analysis of the comment roll, it is suggested, reveals the “backstage” machinations of how the fashion image constructs or invents a narrative of desire around a fashion object and thus contributes to our understanding of the fashion photograph and its sometimes opaque world.

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