Overview

Winner of the 2019 John Collier Jr Award Street style blogging has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity over the last decade. Amateur photographers, often with no formal training in fashion, have become critical arbiters of taste and trends, influencing the representations that appear in magazines and on runways, and putting new cities on the fashion world map. This cutting-edge book documents the evolution of street style photography, from the fieldwork photos of early anthropology to the glamorized snapshots that appear on blogs today, and explores the structural shifts in the global fashion industry that street style has helped bring about. Chronicling author and anthropologist Brent Luvaas’ experience over three years of blogging through vivid street imagery and rich ethnographic detail, this book turns the lens of street style photography back onto anthropology itself, arguing that the phenomenon is a powerful mode of amateur ethnography. Bloggers blur the distinction between professional and amateur, insider and outsider, self and brand. This book documents that blur from the ground level—from the streets of Philadelphia to the sidewalks of New York Fashion Week. Street Style is an essential read for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, and fans of street style photography alike.

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9780857857217

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Reviews

Has street style enriched and democratized fashion or has the latter eaten the former for breakfast? Brent Luvaas' own take on street style gives a unique and much-needed perspective from which we can begin to see what is and what will happen to the presentation of the self in public. Ted Polhemus, photographer and author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk Brent Luvaas is the first academic to show that street style photography is serious business. Style and sartorial expression are important parts of our visual culture, playing a huge role in building our identities, and communicating to others. Street Style is an intriguing study of how street style blogs have become an inseparable part of the fashion industry. Liisa Jokinen, writer, photographer and founder of street style blog Hel Looks This refreshing and engaging book takes us on a journey from the novice street style photographer through to the established street style fashion blogger. It goes far beyond the superficial as Luvaas' auto-ethnographic account exposes the world of the fashion blogger with an anthropologist's insightful eye and art of story-telling. Sophie Woodward, University of Manchester, UK In this book, Luvaas treats us to an array of beautiful street style photographs. But he does so within a theoretically and methodologically sophisticated analysis of street style in its historical and transnational contexts. He also offers us access to his own subjectivity and sense of style radar as a street style photographer and blogger. His self-reflexive awareness of the still-primarily masculinized space of the urban flaneur contributes to the power of this book to unlock binary oppositions between insider versus outsider, amateur versus professional, and street style versus street fashion. Susan Kaiser, University of California, Davis, USA

Has street style enriched and democratized fashion or has the latter eaten the former for breakfast? Brent Luvaas' own take on street style gives a unique and much-needed perspective from which we can begin to see what is and what will happen to the presentation of the self in public. Ted Polhemus, photographer and author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk Brent Luvaas is the first academic to show that street style photography is serious business. Style and sartorial expression are important parts of our visual culture, playing a huge role in building our identities, and communicating to others. Street Style is an intriguing study of how street style blogs have become an inseparable part of the fashion industry. Liisa Jokinen, writer, photographer and founder of street style blog Hel Looks This refreshing and engaging book takes us on a journey from the novice street style photographer through to the established street style fashion blogger. It goes far beyond the superficial as Luvaas' auto-ethnographic account exposes the world of the fashion blogger with an anthropologist's insightful eye and art of story-telling. Sophie Woodward, University of Manchester, UK In this book, Luvaas treats us to an array of beautiful street style photographs. But he does so within a theoretically and methodologically sophisticated analysis of street style in its historical and transnational contexts. He also offers us access to his own subjectivity and sense of style radar as a street style photographer and blogger. His self-reflexive awareness of the still-primarily masculinized space of the urban flaneur contributes to the power of this book to unlock binary oppositions between insider versus outsider, amateur versus professional, and street style versus street fashion. Susan Kaiser, University of California, Davis, USA What I learned from [Street Style] has expanded the way I see fashion. Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America

Author Information

Brent Luvaas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Drexel University, USA

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