Every fashion week I latch onto one image that, for me, sums up my current fashion mood and inspiration. Normally this moment arrives in paris - of course, of course - but I think that maybe this year New York has pipped it to the post. There is a lot of talk going on in the blogosphere - and in real life, as bloggers are want to talk about their industry as much as fashion journalists are - about the place of street style in today's world. Much has been said. Much of it has merit, and much of it smarts so much of generational discord and a slight sense of desperation. Whenever these debates crop up - and they crop up remarkably frequently, with more and more vitriole as the seasons roll past and the number of street style photographers and their willing subjects outside the tents at Lincoln Center or The Tuileries or Somerset House or any of the multitude of off-site shows grows exponentially - I am reminded by an article by Clay Shirky about the death of the newspaper. We read it in third year media studies and one idea from it has always resonated with me, has always been something that springs immediately to mind whenever the old guard of print media whip out their pistols at dawn against the new;
"Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world increasingly resembled the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors... That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen." When you're living in a revolution you can't see the revolution happening, and even if you can, you don't know where it will end or what it will take with it. We just don't know. Suzy Menkes doesn't know, Leandra Medine doesn't know, and I certainly don't know.
So what does it all mean? Does it mean that Suzy wasn't right when she said that there are too many attention-seekers crowding the fashion weeks, yearning for a moment of fame in the lens of a street style photographer? Does it mean that Leandra wasn't right when she said that we are all to blame for our loss of editorial integrity? I think that it means that ultimately Clay Shirky was right. That if we are building a guttenberg press - and I don't think anyone would deny, this far down the track, with this many street style photographers and the nature of this industry, that that is indeed what we are and have always been doing here - then none of us know what the hell is going on and what the hell is going to happen. Could you have asked someone in the middle of the dot com bubble where the internet was going to go and would he have been able to answer coherently? You can ask me where street style and blogging is going to lead and I wouldn't be able to string two sentences together other than this: I have no idea. And this; just look at this picture. Because, like I have always thought, if we only get one moment like this the whole season, then it would all be worth it. All of it.
So what does it all mean? Does it mean that Suzy wasn't right when she said that there are too many attention-seekers crowding the fashion weeks, yearning for a moment of fame in the lens of a street style photographer? Does it mean that Leandra wasn't right when she said that we are all to blame for our loss of editorial integrity? I think that it means that ultimately Clay Shirky was right. That if we are building a guttenberg press - and I don't think anyone would deny, this far down the track, with this many street style photographers and the nature of this industry, that that is indeed what we are and have always been doing here - then none of us know what the hell is going on and what the hell is going to happen. Could you have asked someone in the middle of the dot com bubble where the internet was going to go and would he have been able to answer coherently? You can ask me where street style and blogging is going to lead and I wouldn't be able to string two sentences together other than this: I have no idea. And this; just look at this picture. Because, like I have always thought, if we only get one moment like this the whole season, then it would all be worth it. All of it.
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