Is Street Style Dead?

A couple of weeks back, Independent Fashion Bloggers posted an article asking the provocative question: Is the end of street style near? Sites emulating The Sartorialist, Facehunter, and Street Peeper have become so ubiquitous, so commonplace, so over-exposed, that the fashion cycle has already moved on. We, goes the implicit assumption, have a limited attention span. Street style had its moment. Now it's time for something else. Something, perhaps, "more."

So, is it true? Is street style dead? Or at least dying? Is it on its last legs? Is something poised to replace it?

Well, I have a couple of thoughts on the subject. First, one should always take such claims with a grain of salt. Painting has been declared dead by embittered art critics and MFA students so many times the statement barely elicits a response anymore. The hipster has been declared dead repeatedly on popular websites — usually with a strong glimmer of self-satisfaction — and yet skinny jeans and mustaches are still visible on street corners the industrialized (and industrializing) world over. Things are almost uniformly declared "dead" at the height of their popularity. That's when the elite of cool has the most stake in differentiation. After all, cool is an inexpansible (think "scarce") resource (see Milner 2004). If everyone is cool, no one is. So whenever anything gets too big, the pioneers and the early adopters will have already moved on to something else. Or at least, they will tell you they have moved on to something else. Who knows what they do when no one's watching, except maybe Google.

Second, what do we mean by "street style" in the first place? Chelsea Burcz (of IFB) writes, "What are we sick of? The shallow, substance-less, uncredited, unidentified, mass influx of snap shots of ‘fashionistas’ posing on the streets." Is that what street style is? I was thinking that was more street fashion, the endless snapping of photographs of style stars and fashion icons outside runway shows. Street style's appeal has always been something of its anti-fashion sensibility, its depiction of the imperfect and the idiosyncratic. She goes on to say that what we want now is "a little more insight." We want, she explains, to know what's behind the styles we see. We want to know what makes someone tick, what they do for a living, what their inspirations are. We want to see people surrounded by the objects, things, spaces and places that define them as creative beings. Think The Selby or Backyard Bill. Social scientists call this "context."

But was context missing from street style blogs in the first place? Popular blogs from Buenos Aires to New York have always seemed to me to be as much about the place they're shot as the people featured in them. Dam Style is all cobblestone and canals. The Sartorialist is all fire escapes and concrete. And early street style blogs like Hel Looks have featured interviews since the beginning. Perhaps the imminent death of street style is a misdiagnosis. Perhaps what we are observing is a clinical boredom with fashion photography as usual. Now that the conventions of fashion photography — the stick thin models, the vacant stare, the too-perfect ensemble — are becoming such ordinary features of so many street style blogs, we have begun to notice how problematic they are. We thought street style was something different from that, something more spontaneous, something more immediate, dishing up a more authentic experience. Perhaps we are not bored with street style so much as nostalgic for it.  


So what's next for street style blogs then? Will they disappear or simply transform? If you ask Refinery 29, they think the future is crass commercialism, product placement through "improvised" street shots, the ability to purchase items featured "casually" on blog posts. IFB doesn't agree. They think the future points towards "richer content." It's no longer marketable to just post pictures. Now one needs interviews, background information, the impression of depth. Curious, however, that they label this movement towards depth as a "trend." If the fashion cycle really does feed on novelty and change for its own sake, it seems almost contradictory for it to produce depth as a consequence. Is that what happened to network TV when its market share was threatened by cable? Is that what's happening to the music industry now?

But there's an even greater question that ought to be asked here: why must street style blogs bear the burden of meaningfulness in a way that other style blogs (think personal style or menswear blogs) are not required to do? Why must we justify their content? There's an almost moral underpinning to these arguments. Fashion, after all, is about images and impressions, selling fantasies and illusions. It doesn't pretend to be something "more." Why should street style? 


My guess is that it's because street style was thought to be above fashion, a grass-roots expression at odds with the manipulations and machinations of the fashion industry as usual. These days, however, that distinction is becoming less and less clear. We are longing for clarity. And we are longing for some small aspect of who we are to be beyond commodification.