BY SHELDON
I recently read an essay on street style that made me aware of a terrible and undeniable truth.
Street style started as something unique, inspiring and true. Since the beginning, people had to turn to runway shows and fashion ad campaigns in search for inspiration, the next trend or to catch the style of the season, but when street style began they had an alternative; they could instead take a look at what a regular Joe was wearing somewhere around the world, merging his personal style and clothing into his everyday life and get ideas from it.
This became shocking and revealing. People on the street, with no intention of being photographed, became inspiration for others. Next thing you now, people started to see in street style icons a more personal approach to brands and designers; they could picture themselves wearing designer clothes and merging them with elements of their own to make it something unique. As a result, street style became a pretty important and relevant platform in fashion that inspired everyone from common people to designers and editors. But all of this eventually ended.
What's happening nowadays with street style is that people have become too self-aware of it and now wonder the streets of famous street style photographers (to whom I seriously admire for what they've created) wearing outrageous outfits in search of being photographed. It has turned from something 'accidental' to something intentional. The outside people that once was working for fashion became the inside of it. Nowadays there are thousands of street style blogs and everyone dresses to get pictured. Trends have become so spottable and overexposed that now you can see pictures of people wearing three or more different trend elements in one outfit making it all look perfectly planned, conscious and quite distasteful just to be a part of this world. Few remain being true style icons.
Will this eventually bore street style photographers? Will they discover something fresher and start the whole cycle again? What I fear eventually will happen is that street style will become so over thought and exposed that it will lose its relevance and we'll just look up to the famed, true style icons. Some say fashion is already looking for the next big thing.