Fab Fashion Sites and Books: Apply To Your Style

A few years ago I've discovered street fashion blogs and decided it could be a great way to get feedback about the trends, brands and styles right off the street through the great photographs of professional street fashion bloggers. This is - don't you think - what social media is all about? Easy access to your interests, hobbies and passions...

Having photographed all my life and having a fascination with the street photography, some of the blogs were a true finding for me not only to stay current on all the trends from around the world, but also to stay true with my passion for photography. And  now ,what feels like back-to-old-school times - an oxymoron, the books are following the social media - to capture and conserve the street styles that change.

There are a few blogs that especially stand out from the thousands of blogs out there. In the last decades street fashion blogs grew like mushrooms. There are blogs on basically everything that one would want to know about street style. From "the founding father" of Bill Cunningham to the modern geniuses Scott Schuman and Brian Boy. 

(Watch one of the videos by Cunningham and with his narration here.)

This what the fashionable tigress, Cathy Horyn, of the New York Time's Fashion column says about Cunningham:

He calls grown-up women child, and his coterie of young friends muffin. Bill Cunningham has been a habitual presence on the streets of New York for nearly 50 years, and Paris and London know him, too. But as a subject, he has been elusive, a shadow on the run with his camera, who still worries, at 73, about falling into ''the traps of the rich.'' Here, people who have known or observed him since his hat-making days in the 1950's turn their gaze on him.

This is how much the influence of this man's street shots have on the most prominent figures in fashion. Click here.

I like how often street fashion changes, you can almost see the passing of time. I loved shooting around the streets of my home towns and when I travel. It captures a moment - a moment of truth, originality and inviduality.

Every time I travel to a different country, I take a notice of how locals dress there - before I go and in real time while being in a different locale. As a matter of fact - I try to take photos of the people I meet on the streets of the places I visit, just as many street fashion bloggers out there, who pride themselves not only in taking beautiful street photography, but in discovering new trends, which are very often overlooked by the fashion magazine editors.

My advice, if you are going to travel, study some of the street fashion blogs. Even better, get yourself a book or two as I just did. They'd give you an idea of both what to not take with you on a trip and also what's "cool and trendy" to shop for when you are traveling...That applies to any other country and continent. 

The book that I'm now a proud owner of is - The Sartorialist, by a street fashion blogger Scott Schuman, who compiled the many images he took on the streets of very many cities he's traveled to - Milan, Paris, Moscow, London, Stockholm, Tokyo, Beijing, New York... He is the author of the popular blog The Sartorialist. His images would definitely give you a very good insight view and a thorough sense of what fashionable people in other countries have been up to with their street style...

And just like me, most of them ride their bikes around the city to shoot those tirelessly walking "high-on-style" people in a city:

Fashion blogger Hanneli Mustaparta, scooting for street style on a bike

Bill Cunningham is THE notorious street fashion photographer who is know for having been using only one kind of transportation at work - his bike

This is one of the best books on street fashion and style that you can get.

Book Description:

In the beginning, Scott Schuman just wanted to take photographs of people that he met on the streets of New York who he felt looked great. The blog he started, thesartorialist.com, is now an interantionally renowned site and a showcase for the wonderful and varied sartorial tastes of real people across the globe. This book is a beautiful anthology of Scott's favourite images, accompanied by his insightful commentary. Published here as a limited edition hardback, with a hand-signed card from Scott inside, it includes photographs of well-known fashion figures alongside people encountered on the street whose personal style and taste demands a closer look. From the streets of New York to Florence, Stockholm, to Paris, London to Moscow and Milan, these are the men and women who have inspired Scott and the widely diverse readers of his blog.

 You might also like Street View, Face Hunter and New York Look Book: A Gallery of Street Fashion - and they are all available on Amazon.com and at the Strand Bookstore in New York City when I recently purchased my The Sartorialist book. 

 And here is my take on street fashion - taken in Washington, DC on a very hot summer day.

How do you find the street fashion of Washington, DC? What would you change?