Images On The Street : Fashion, Personal Style, And The Sartorialist
Drawing on urban modernity and subcultures, the street photography of the online site, The Sartorialist, is interpreted within a history of everyday style on the streets (or "streetstyle") since the mid-twentieth century. The paper argues that, as a digital archive of streetstyle, The Sartorialist creates a convincing portrait of the mythic notion of self-invention through fashion by tying style to a variety of elements of the real. Through a distant reading of the archive and semiotic analysis of the images, the underlying structures of meaning-making on the site are revealed. Through a condensation of Nancy's theory of the image and Benjamin's conception of the wish in the dream, I argue that The Sartorialist both validates and highlights the ultimate limitations of the urban project of fashion and encourages a particular way of looking at the world.