Exercices de style

05/07/2012

«What is style?» One of my students asked me this question the other day. We were discussing street style photography - the art of shooting stylish strangers on the street, then posting the images to a blog (see The Sartorialist for a classic example). The idea is to inspire readers. But how is one to judge who's stylish and who is not?
Mostly it's subjective, of course. You shoot the people who catch your eye. Usually, they have a certain flair for combining cut and colour. A lot of it is about accessories: the right scarf, a daring pair of shoes, a magnificent hat. But in this week of haute couture shows, it's important to note that style is not the same as fashion. The 1920s photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue are full of people whose easy stylishness goes beyond fashion. The writer Susan Sontag once defined style as «speech or movement or behaviour or objects [that] exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being.» So style is about divergence, the impractical flourish that makes all the difference, injecting a bit of poetry into the quotidian. Susan Sontag herself had a lot of style, both in her writing and her appearance. Like many stylish people, she was also something of an outsider; a wilful oddity. And that, I think, may be the real answer to the question. Style is the desire and the courage to be different.