the sartorialist book

"Maybe you'll find inspiration in a colour combination, or may be in a play on textures or a mix of genres, for example 'punk meets eskimo'. I like people to draw their own conclusions, to find their own inspiration without the influence of a guiding hand"

Just picked up this little piece of fashion history from Kinokuniya, the Sartorialist book. I'm sure the Sartorialist blog is familiar to many people and this book is a collection of the street style photographs taken by and featured on the blog by Scott Schuman, who started the blog as a hobby after leaving his full time job. While the idea of the street style snap can be traced back to Shoichi Aoki who pioneered the idea in his STREET magazine in the mid 90s, documenting youth wearing weird and off beat clothing on the Japanese streets, it very much remained on the printed medium until the beginning of this decade, with the advent of affordable digital cameras and personal web publishing platforms like blogger or wordpress. The Sartorialist is perhaps one of the oldest and probably the most influential street style blogs in the Anglo-European world, enumerating through the pictures that style does not equal trendiness. Documenting stylish people of across a spectrum of ages dressing in a variety of genres (many times unclassifiable), The Sartorialist, to me, embodies the fashion zeigeist in the later half of the 00s, the dwindling of power of the "designer's vision" and the decline of the top down flow of fashion trends by way of the print media, making way for a more democractic and individualized approach to style and the power of personal curation.







16.50usd on Amazon
48.15sgd at Kinokuniya