Communications student Loane Concy Clementia recently stood outside the Rabanne show at Paris Fashion Week, wearing a black bra, a white lace and satin skirt and a white fur bomber off the shoulder. She doesn’t have a ticket for the show, but she’s happily posing for photographers outside. The 21-year-old has already done the same outside Balmain and Acne Studios that day, and has plans later to stand outside Rick Owens. She’s been doing this every fashion week for three years.
“I just go out in the morning and do the full day,” she says. She collectss the photos taken of her from photographers or finds them on Instagram. “I have a degree in sewing and fashion design. I used to make clothes just for street style. I stopped [that] a little but I’m coming back this summer. It’s all about my passion for fashion!”
The communications student isn’t alone in her quest for photo ops — and proximity to the fashion industry — outside fashion shows. Outside Rick Owens, makeup artist Cannelle, who moved to Paris one year prior, says she volunteered at fashion week last season and so this season wanted to be involved again. “I just got up this morning, put on an outfit and thought why not,” she says. The outfit isn’t Rick, but is in line with the designer’s aesthetic. She plans to reshare the photos on her socials after, to show off her look.
It’s a sign of how much the street style scene has evolved since the early blog days, from Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist to Tommy Ton’s Jak and Jil, which followed in the steps of Bill Cunningham’s street style work for The New York Times. In 2006/2007, Style.com (now Vogue Runway) hired Schuman, who had launched The Sartorialist in 2005. The fashion crowd loved seeing photos of themselves on the site, much as they did in the parties section, and a new traffic engine surrounding fashion month content was born.
At the time, those photographed outside the shows were the ones attending them: editors, buyers, the odd celebrity. These days, you can count on a mix of those there to do their job (the usual suspects, plus some influencers), many more celebrities, often dressed head-to-toe by the brand whose show they’re attending, and swans without tickets, dressed to the nines, there to see and be seen.
Both Schuman and Ton are still regulars on the fashion month circuit, but the street style machine in which they operate has changed vastly. Instagram rapidly expanded street style’s scope, driving a surge in both photographers and subjects (most of whom are influencers, or aspiring to be). Many of the photographers outside shows today got their start with Instagram accounts and adjacent blogs. Vogue publishes daily roundups of the best street style in each fashion week city, captured by photographer Phil Oh. The galleries continue to be a big traffic driver.
Now that street style has ballooned into its own industry machine — with money to be made — it’s morphed from its original purpose as a way to document who attended shows and what they wore. Each season, crowds of photographers are posted up on the streets outside shows, capturing the increasingly busy scenes outside, as more and more people show up to the show locations — ticket or not — in hope of their fashion week style being captured on camera. Who are they, and what does it mean for the state of street style?
Changing scenes
Street style is the one part of fashion week you don’t need a ticket to access. As social media has made show schedules and locations more accessible, more amateur photographers will show up to get content — as will fashion fanatics and brand fans.
“The environment outside fashion show entrances has changed dramatically,” says Szymon Brzóska, who is behind the Instagram account The Style Stalker. “At the beginning of my career, I was working among about 50 photographers. Today, there can be as many as 1,000 people outside a show, as is the case at Dior in Paris. This season I didn’t even come for the first day in Paris — for me that show has simply lost its point [because of the scramble].”
TikTok has added fuel to the social media flames, photographers agree. It’s not the dressed up brand fans that complicate logistics, but the fandom frenzies, photographer Morgane Maurice says. “Hordes of fans descend hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity,” she says. “Most locations are now fenced off and with heavy security, making it sometimes near impossible to shoot.”
Vogue’s Oh puts this down to brands “discovering” the power of Asian pop stars in the mid-2010s. Since, they’ve increased their investment in K-pop stars and Thai actors. Fans and stans have cottoned on, and now show up to the show location in droves. “Now the big shows are absolutely insane,” Oh says. “Showgoers used to complain about ‘peacocks’ blocking their paths to show venues, but now it’s hordes of screaming girls hoping to get a glimpse of someone/anyone.”
Stans are out in force in Milan and Paris, crowding fashion show entrances in support of their favourite ambassadors. For brands, the reach outweighs the chaos.
What’s the shot?
The online attention to the scenes outside shows mean brands have started to pay more mind to this off-runway traffic driver. This means dressing more attendees, knowing they’ll be papped not just in the front row, but walking into the venue. Sometimes, they’ll commission photographers themselves to ensure they get the shot. They tend to have more budget than the alternatives, Maurice says.
It’s resulted in a more commercialized street style, photographers agree. Brzóska finds that “most” guests these days are dressed by the brands whose shows they are attending, except for those working in the industry. Oh finds that brand agreements are, at times, why attendees are so keen to be photographed. “People might have deals with brands and need to be photographed wearing this jacket or carrying that bag,” he says.
Maurice always tries to shoot a diverse range of people, as well as those with personal style, which, she says, is increasingly hard to find at the bigger shows (thanks to the full look policies). “To be honest, street style today is very commercial — it’s about trends and big brands,” Brzóska says. “I don’t feel much individuality in it.”
Oh always tries to find the most fun and interesting outfits to shoot — even if the look doesn’t work 100%, he says. “The hope is that these pictures will inspire viewers to try something new with their own wardrobes. People in their own clothes, as in not a borrowed full-look, are a priority, but as these images have become more commodified, it’s more rare than one would think,” he says.
Enter the brand fans. Many of the people showing up outside these shows are there to get a taste of an industry they are striving to work in and want to feel part of. At Schiaparelli, Ukrainian stylist and influencer Olena Batalina was posing for photos, wearing a top hat and black corset by Ukrainian designers with gold sequin horns on the boobs, of her own creation. Batalina was not attending the show. “I’m in love with Schiaparelli,” she says, “I love the people here and it’s about atmosphere”. Elsewhere, 19-year-old Taisiia Stankova, an aspiring stylist, stood outside Issey Miyake in an asymmetrical pinstripe jacket, a mesh skull cap and a baby pink mini-skirt of her own design, with her dog Emmy in a pink sweater. She moved to Paris six months ago, and hopes she can use the photos for her Instagram. “I’m here to take some photos and show my look with my little dog Emmy,” she says.
While these fans aren’t the priority for photographers, they respect the hustle — and the looks. “I’m happy to photograph anyone who looks great. I like the people who come to the shows — they are real enthusiasts,” Brzóska, adding that his followers value style inspiration more than they do celebrity. Still, photographers’ favorite looks aren’t always what perform. Vogue’s Oh says that how well a photo ‘performs’ online is generally inversely proportional to how much he likes it. Though he prioritizes looks he thinks are cool, he makes sure to get the celebs too. “I also look for celebrities, because I have to, but it’s the least fun and interesting part of my job,” he says.
Instead of fashion media or Getty, a lot of the money these days comes from individual clients and brands, photographers say, which means that a lot of the people hanging about outside shows without tickets aren’t the primary focus. Asaf Liberfroind, who runs The Street Vibe, tries to only shoot guests of the event, because that’s what he’s there to do for his clients. But this is increasingly difficult, he says, because there are so many people outside the show. “I try to stick to the principle: shoot insiders with good style.”
Typically, what ends up featuring in publications — and on photographers’ own accounts — is a mix of content and attendees: celebrity content for clicks and eyeballs; industry people for industry interest (and, again, clicks) and outfits photographers and editors think are interesting in an effort to showcase the fashion happening off the runway.
Even as the industry grows, fashion week street style is serving freelance photographers less and less, Maurice says. “Jobs have been harder to come by and with the shooting conditions deteriorating, the exhaustion levels creep up,” she says. “I used to see more direct results from shooting at fashion week: booking more jobs there, or immediately after, through gained visibility. Now so many people do it, it’s hard to stand out.”
Brzóska also feels like brands’ increased investments in — and focus on — megawatt celebrity brand ambassadors means that they’ve inviting less run-of-the-mill influencers than they were at their late-2010s peak. This means less outfits to shoot, he says. “A fight for every outfit has begun, simply because there are so few of them.”
Brzóska is now considering a rewind. “Documenting street style — which is how I started in 2012 — is speaking to me more and more again,” he says, pointing to his favorite photo he took last year, a passerby in a striking outfit that he noticed while shooting a friend. It wasn’t during fashion month.
With reporting by Lucy Maguire.
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