The Fashion Spot

Since Henri Cartier-Bresson picked up a 50mm Leica camera and gave birth to photojournalism at the beginning of the 20th century; we have been fascinated by candid shots of people on the street. At the end of the Nineties, the advent of the internet has seen an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of street style, none more apparent than in the case of The Sartorialist.

The blog of American Scott Schuman, a 4 year old website which documents the varied sartorial taste of fashionable folk from places as diverse as London, New York, Paris, Milan, India, and Sweden (to name a few) now receives 1.3 million hits a month, and has established Schuman as a unique force within the fashion industry. Following an exhibition at Danziger Projects last year, he has compiled his favourite images in a handsome anthology published by Penguin. Dazed spoke to the man on the eve of launching his pop-up shop, The SartoriaLUST at Liberty’s during London Fashion Week.



Dazed Digital: How did the book come about?
Scott Schuman: I always knew what I wanted to do with the book and what I wanted to accomplish with it. I wanted it to reflect the blog, not so much in a literal way but in the spirit of the blog. The blog is about things not having to be super expensive, a mix of high end and low end. One of the reasons why working with Penguin was so perfect was that they were willing to do a paperback version and a hardcover at the same time. That really made it work for me. I really wanted to do a bespoke edition, limited edition, beautiful and expensive. But then I wanted people to have something not so expensive where they could rip out the pages and paste the pictures up, something like that. I didn’t want to do a big coffee table book. Penguin was totally onboard with all that stuff.

DD: It must be satisfying to see your pictures in a gallery or in a book – giving it a sense of permanence the internet maybe does not?
Scott Schuman: The funny part is that the internet will give it not only a permanence, once it’s out there it’s totally out of my control. Once they’re on the internet, they take on a life of their own but I think that technology that it is now like no other time that we’ve had before, the permanence will come from the fact that I can take a picture today and my contemporaries can make a comment on those pictures and we can capture their thoughts. Someone like Lartigue who shot a lot of people around the streets in the 1900's or even Bill Cunningham, people can look at those pictures but we don’t know what those people were thinking at that time. But with the blog now, you know, I’m working to archive and save these comments so that in, say a 100 years, people can not only look at these pictures but also know what we were thinking at that time, what those issues were. So I really like that part. I take the pictures and capture what people are thinking right now but I also think about what this is going to mean historically.



DD: There’s the sense of community on your website where people post comments and sometimes fall in love with the subjects in your photos. Is the goal intimacy with the subject?
Scott Schuman: One of the things I try and do is keep a distance from a lot of these people. I have a very short time and I like to shoot them in the romantic way that I see them. For me it always seems to work out better that way.

DD: Terry Richardson would say he would always put himself in the portrait whereas Bruce Weber would say he would only photograph things he could never be. Which camp do you fall in?
Scott Schuman: Somewhere right in between that. There’s definitely an aspirational aspect to it – something that I want to be. One of the things that separates me from other people who shot street style before me, they always shot the most dramatic thing, things people had never seen anywhere. Like Amy Arbus, she shot for the Village Voice in the early 90's, she would shoot the punks and the most dramatic people. Which is great but I  don’t really relate to that. What’s different about what I do is I shoot something that is aspirational and something that people can really relate to. People of different sizes, races and income levels.

DD: Do you think that’s why your website has succeeded? That you celebrates different aspects of beauty and make fashion more democratic and accessible?
Scott Schuman: That wasn’t the goal when I started out. I was just shooting people that I saw that I really liked. I can find inspiration from a lot of different cultures, different kinds of people. I’m never looking for something that’s perfect, if anything if it is perfect, it’s harder for me to relate to it.



DD: You have a pic of Bill Cunningham from The New York Times in your book – an inspiration of yours? Would you like to do it as long as he did?
Scott Schuman: Oh yeah I’d love to be doing this for the rest of my life. It’s funny – I’m a self taught photographer and I can’t really say he was specifically an influence. He was more of an influence as a fashion person. My background is in fashion marketing and just like any other person I would look at his page on Sunday. But I never said,  “Oh I want to be like Bill Cunningham” or anything, it wasn’t anything like that. So he was probably a loose inspiration. I do really respect him as a person, he’s so committed to it. So that’s more of an inspiration than anything else, his commitment to that.

DD: You taught yourself photography? What magazines did you read growing up?
Scott Schuman: American GQ was the first fashion magazine that I started reading when I was in junior high. I-D, Italian Vogue…But growing up in Indiana, it was hard to get those magazines and there was no internet and the fact that we didn’t have many things like that helps me to keep the romance of it. For me there’s still this romanticized idea of what the fashion world must be like. It took so long for me to actually move here that it was so ingrained in my head and I still see the world that way. Not growing up with the magazines that I would have liked to had that effect on me.



DD: The book is dedicated to your late father – how was he inspirational to your life?
Scott Schuman: Like any good father. His inspiration was more as a person and in some ways that’s the very core of the book. How he looked at people and how he looked at the world. He was always very respectful. So I like that. I shoot a lot of people for the blog whose style I wouldn’t necessarily wear but I can think it’s great and respect the quality of what they do. He grew up in North Dakota which is even more rural than Indiana, and he used to say he was too stupid to know that he couldn’t do something. And there was this acceptance of being naïve which I think is beautiful. With this blog, I didn’t know that I could become a photographer for GQ, I didn’t really know anything about photography. I knew it probably was a stretch. But I came up with my own take and to me, there was no reason why I couldn’t be. I didn’t realize how big that world was but I let myself be stupid. So sometimes ignorance can be bliss.