(To our Tumblr followers: we read you on the feed side b/c Cindy really loathes using the Tumblr interface for reading posts.)
Street style is officially out of control. What used to be just Bill Cunningham roaming around the streets of New York with a camera, and morphed into the more stylized portraits of the Sartorialist now means that every city has like twenty amateur style bloggers leaping out of alleys to take pictures of homeless peoples’ outfits, while, according to a piece in today’s Guardian, fashionistas are now really offended if some hack with a camera doesn’t want to commemorate their style. …
While the concept of the street style blog is unassailably awesome and a theoretical challenge to the prevailing dogma of the fashion mags, the truth is the standards really aren’t that different — everyone’s still young, thin and cool; and if they aren’t there’s something faintly behind-glassy and exploitative about them. Really, it’s a sort of pernicious, inexorable high-fashioning of everyday life, and it’s hard not to be ambivalent, however much we like the pictures. … Ironically, the quest for the unique is only serving to reinforce the norm.
(via Jezebel)
Thank you, Sadie Stein, thank you. 99% of “style” blogs, especially in NYC and London, are nothing more than collections of “fashionistas,” which — loosely translated — actually means awkward looking skinny girls in hipster costumes featuring nine to thirteen poorly coordinated expensive and/or downmarket “statement piece” accessories. (Ladies, we all know that some of you would be much more comfortable in your Smithie twinset or something you picked up at the mall. It’s patently obvious. It should also be pointed out that 80s fashions, unless they’re couture, aren’t yet “vintage.” They’re merely second hand.) Everyone of a certain age looks exactly the same — simultaneously pre-pubescent and haggard. These words shouldn’t go together, but certainly do prompt one or the other of us to hiss “Grrrl, don’t wear that!” on a regular basis. We’re not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, but we’ll wait for the backlash…maybe it will come with large-scale protest against high fructose corn syrup. That would be rad. (Meanwhile, I’ll be at Les Halles having a steak, continuing to look like no one but myself.) That being said, we totally love Hel-Looks, and FaceHunter has a totally awesome list of street style blogs in cities outside of the New York, London, Paris, Milan fashion-mill.