The Situation With Street Style

How many light years ago was it that we first saw clusters of fashion week photographers kneeling to photograph somebody’s shoe? That time now seems distant and quaint. As the editors of Vogue noted in a barbed round-table posting about Milan Fashion Week, greeted by both cheers and derision (mostly derision), the street-side catwalk is now largely a means of hyping styles, trends and merchandise already in circulation, with scarcely any relation to fresh ideas. Calling the quick-change artists and freebie-hustlers of the collections sideshow “pathetic,” “embarrassing” and “sad,” the Vogue editors bemoaned the practice of Instagram-baiting as a herald of the death of real style. The bloggers shot back with their own critique of an industry that benefits richly from cozy relationships with designers and labels. “Bloggers who wear paid-for outfits or borrowed clothes are merely doing the more overt equivalent” of the editorial credit system,” @susiebubble, as the British blogger Susanna Lau is known, wrote to her 277,000 Twitter followers. Read more at The New York Times.