BTW, I’m originally from Honolulu (now living in Cambridge, MA), so if you have any questions about Hawaii, feel free to email me.

I wasn’t sure if you had come across this yet, but as a design student, it seems like something you’d appreciate and have thoughts on. Is using one of Butterick’s most famous and long-last patterns, in its entirety, essentially okay? A young fashion designer in St. Louis seems to think it’s all right.

scott schumann is, if nothing else, is a huge contradiction…that much is completely clear, after this whole kerfuffle.

it also feels as if he also has an incredibly hard time articulating himself…which makes things even more complicated for him.

bottom line: he takes picture of stylish people he sources from the streets.

the people he snaps pictures of live in our times, and said people are often times wearing the VERY latest fashions. especially those people he snaps at the bi-yearly fashion shows…they are almost always wearing only the most current of styles. and even if his subjects aren’t insanely trendy, they are wearing clothes and living in the present. if they aren’t wearing “what’s out there” now, then what are they doing? in the most literal sense? is he taking pictures of fashions and people from the future? the past? what is he taking pictures of? who is he taking pictures of??

you also point out that he constantly talks about style…about what people wear. about fashion in the general sense. his blog is about style, no??

and yet, as of a post he made today, he claims this:

“I personally have never thought of this as a “Street Style” blog

I am sharing what I see that inspires me – it just so happens that a lot of what i see on the street inspires me but I also like magazines or fashion shows or whatever.”

the fact that he is shooting photographs of people who inspire him or move him aesthetically in some way is to me, implicit…it is what almost any photographer who shoots people, especially most street (fashion) photographers, would say they do. they are all, in the most literal sense, REPORTING ON WHAT’S OUT THERE.

his idea of what and who he is is unclear. he has a hard time stepping outside of himself and seeing his place in the world. does he even really know what that place is, or who he is, and where he fits in in society, in our culture? i am actually sort of unsure…because everything he says contradicts the last thing he says. it makes my head spin!

it seems as if he wants to somehow set himself apart from other people of his ilk, other “street fashion photographers”. as if he thinks of himself as different, a cut above. something! he actually seems a bit delusional as to what he actually does and how it’s generally perceived by the world at large. what’s so wrong with being a “street style” photographer or having a street style blog, anyway?

That the site is only supposed to focus on streetstyle has been an issue before. Do you remember when he went to India? He took a lot of grief for posting this:

http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/2008/03/tough-way-to-start-saturday-morning-new.html

When people called him out on posting non-fashion-related issues, others rushed to his defense. Scott eventually replied with “I am a photographer and taking photos is what I do… at the end of the day this blog is a visual diary of my life….”

Frankly, that reply did not sit well with me. I’ve been paying attention to The Sartorialist since almost the beginning, and his reply goes against his previous policy. Whenever people tried to bring up issues in his photos not related to “style” — e.g., smoking cigarettes is unhealthy, riding a bicycle without a helmet is not safe, how capturing and posting such acts condones them — Scott would say that they have nothing to do with style and, therefore, BACK OFF. Eventually, Scott was explicitly saying to not discuss such subjects.

Then he goes to India and brings up world issues.

Talk about contradictions.

Sometimes Scott will advocate that style is more than just about fashion — you know, the whole “confidence” and “knowing yourself” shebang that we already understand. Other times, he’ll say that his blog is only about “style,” as in, what you wear and how you look. He needs to make up his mind already. He can’t have it both ways.

Style encompasses an entire way of living. It’s not just about what you wear and how you look; it’s about what you consume, what you eat, who you love and what your morals are. Scott needs to either embrace this in his blog (or potential companion blog) completely, or he needs to stay the hell away from anything beyond streetstyle and clothes.

I’m a bit torn at the idea of ‘makeover’ because in his comments, he suggests that it was the girl wanting to experiment and he was merely assisting. In which case, surely the term ’style experiment’ would be more fitting? Yet in the initial post, it eludes to something completely different – that he disliked everything about her look and wanted to make it better. On the whole, I am against makeovers – the very word denotes a dictator of style approach to me, but in some ways I think it’d be interesting to see exactly what the Sart defines as style.

Oh, regarding what you said Tricia, I do think it stems a little away from the idea of a street style photographer – who in my eyes documents exactly what they see, not what they have adapted and made better. Whether what s/he document is stylish or not, remains up to onlooker to decide because it would already be in line with what the photographer views as style.

In general, it simply sounds to me like he is starting to sound like that know-it-all in class that nobody likes. I think he is approaching it without malice, but its kind of weird! He’ll probably get some attention for straying from the norm of his posts, but if he strays too far then his blog will lose that which people read the blog for in the first place.

The basic problem is that imposing a “look” on people goes against the reason why these people are out on the street dressed as themselves in the first place! Why do I want to see the Sartorialist dressing people when the real draw is that these are “real people”?