As much as I love clothing, I’ve never been one for fashion magazines. Leafing through pages and pages of gorgeous clothes that I can’t afford is a torture akin to window-shopping. Plus, the fact that the photo spreads look exactly like the ten million ads they’re sandwiched between makes it no secret that they’re just trying to buy you. I want more. I thirst for real creativity that I can approach without feeling unworthy.
Luckily, I have the internet. Long ago I learned to scratch my inspiration itch by trolling websites that host pictures of real people in their real clothes, looking real good. Sometime in high school, I discovered that teenvogue.com featured pictures of girls in inspired outfits assembled straight from their own wardrobes. While I didn’t have the same clothes as these girls, just seeing how a real person pulled off boho chic made it so much easier to assess my own resources and decide how to proceed with my own sartorial vision.
As I’ve continued to live as a dedicated follower of fashion, I’ve graduated from teenvogue.com and have assembled an army of online sources of amateur couture that simultaneously satisfy my lust for the pretty and stir my creativity.
Although many would argue that its heyday is over, Vice magazine, available at viceland.com, is still a pretty reliable purveyor of images of hipsters and their urban style. Their yearly Global Trend Report, which features snap shots of international urban fashion organized by city, is a fascinating look at what makes cool people look cool. While they’ve taken a turn for the decidedly weird lately, the Dos and Don’ts in a corner of the main page were once a great way to keep tabs on the clotheshorses lurking in the far corners of Brooklyn and Montreal. Go through the archives-you won’t be disappointed.
Blogs are the perfect medium for this egalitarian attitude toward fashion, and none have captured the pulse of street fashion as well as Face Hunter (facehunter.blogspot.com). The blog’s mission is to post “eye candy for the style hungry,” and it accomplishes this in a tremendous way. In addition to posting pictures of people from all around the world looking swell in their everyday duds, it serves as a portal to city-specific blogs that document street style from Oslo to Sao Paolo.
No discussion of street style would be complete without mentioning Bill Cunningham, whose pictures of the garments that grace Manhattan’s sidewalks are featured in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times. Every week, his photo collages are turned into slideshows for the website, complete with commentary by the man himself. As silly as it may sound, I always look for myself among the images-and why shouldn’t I? I’m a real person who wears real clothes, and in this kind of fashion photography, that’s more than half the battle.
Is Katherine George the Third? Find out at kln9@georgetown.edu.
