When did street style become more important than the catwalk?

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/sep/26/fashion-week-street-style-catwalk-brangelina

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It seems that the majority of the coverage of fashion weeks is not of the clothes on the runways but the ridiculous ones worn by people at the shows. Why is this? And isn’t this kind of blatant attention-seeking a bit tragic?

Carole, by email

You are absolutely right, Carole, that the shows have become at least as much about the clothes people wear as they are about the ones on the runway. The rise of “street style” – the term for photos of people wearing outfits out and about – is the purest form of what people mean when they talk loftily about “the democratisation of fashion”.

Now anyone can take photos for fashion blogs, not just accredited photographers with access to the Prada show, and anyone can be celebrated as a fashion icon, not just models and celebrities. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course, as with pretty much everything cited as evidence of fashion’s all-new and improved nature, this is cobblers. It’s like how fashion magazines now insist that they celebrate a “healthy” physique as opposed to merely a “thin” one; by “healthy” they mean “a very thin model who looks like she spends five hours a day with a personal trainer and has launched an athleisure clothing line”. The vocabulary has altered a little but, really, it is all business as usual. After all, for all the talk of the “democracy” of street style, it is still, by and very large, only thin and beautiful people wearing expensive clothes who are photographed. Nonetheless, the simple fact that they are on the street as opposed to a runway gives the illusion of accessibility and relatability: two concepts people desire now and so fashion feels it has to pay lip service to them, fraudulent and tokenistic as it may be.

Obviously, at a fashion show you will find people who enjoy dressing up, which is why fashion weeks are peak time for street-style photographers. So because there are now so many of these snappers outside the shows, anyone who gets some kind of kick out of being photographed for a fashion blog will dress accordingly. Which in turn brings more photographers. Which means – OK, you get the picture.

Now, I do see what you mean, Carole, about the attention-seeking, but for a different reason from you. I have no problem with people dressing up for shows: if anything, I think it’s polite to the designers to make a bit of effort. And for heavens’ sake, if you can’t have a bit of fun with the dress-up box at a fashion show, where can you? But there is definitely something a bit weird about how desperately some people old enough to know better now want to be photographed by the street-style bloggers. Sure, everyone likes to be admired from time to time, but there is a fine line between “appreciating admiration” and “desperately needing external validation”, and I think you’ve crossed that line when you’re over 40 and you post on Instagram every time you’re featured on a street-style blog. This is the fashion equivalent of retweeting a compliment, and neither form of behaviour is acceptable from anyone over 18. For heaven’s sake, how can we convince the younger generations that they shouldn’t rely on external approval when we, the oldsters, are doing just that? Rein it in, people. If you want to dress up, dress up! But do it for yourself, not for a 22-year-old Russian style blogger.

Bloody hell, there were about a hundred articles about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the Guardian website last week!!!!!! Is this a newspaper or Hello! magazine?????

Too many people, Out there

And once again, we must return to a regular feature on this page entitled, “Just because something does not interest you does not mean it is not interesting.” Here’s how this story goes, folks: no, a celebrity’s divorce is not hard news in the way, say, attacks in Syria are. But it is still an event in which a lot of people are interested and, guess what, covering the latter does not mean not covering the former. All interests can be catered for on the crazy world wide web where space is limitless. So if you don’t want to read about Brad and Angelina, allow me to direct you to the literally billions of other articles out there about other subjects.

If it upsets you so much that the papers ran some coverage of a story that you don’t find interesting, imagine how I feel every four years during the World Cup. So don’t rage at the papers for daring to not cater to your specific interests: either skip the stories that don’t appeal to you and read something else, or set up your own paper that will only cover your kind of stories. The choice, as Graham from Blind Date used to say, is yours!

The fact is, moral high ground inhabitants, a lot of people want to read about Pitt and Jolie, because they have been part of the pop culture landscape for over 20 years. If these people actually buy the newspaper to read this story, well, newspapers will have more money to cover stories like Syria. So win-win! Of course, this only works if readers actually pay to read stories, as opposed to just reading everything on the web for free and then complaining about the diminished investigative and foreign news coverage in favour of regurgitated press releases about celebrities. But that’s another issue for another day, eh, readers?