Homogenizing the City/Re-classifying the Street: Tommy Ton’s Street Style Fashion Show Photographs

Abstract | Since the mid-2000s, street style blogs have documented individualized fashion in international cities. With their rise to prominence, photo-bloggers turned their lenses towards mobilities outside fashion show venues in the dominant industry capitals. Fashion Month is the bi-annual circuit of women’s ready-to-wear presentations in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Each Fashion Week is an enactment of what fashion scholars, pace Pierre Bourdieu, term the field of fashion (Entwistle and Rocamora). This exclusive assemblage can also be described as a scene. This article contends that the circulation of media representations of fashion show attendees, under the banner street style, appropriates a contested term and reinscribes fashion’s elitist social and material ideals. I examine the career of Canadian photographer Tommy Ton and perform content analysis on photographs captured from the Spring/Summer 2014 and Fall/Winter 2014 seasons posted to Condé Nast Media’s Style.com. I trace the term street style to its definition as fashion “observed on the street” (Woodward) and to historical references to subcultures. I then situate online street style photography within a history of depictions of citizens in urban locations and contestations between the “real” and the “authentic” in editorial fashion. Combining Gillian Rose’s notion of social modality with Agnès Rocamora’s fashion media discourse analysis, I describe how Ton’s aesthetic combines non-place-specific architecture with ideal bodies and luxury signifiers to communicate social distinction. Ton’s photographs do not foreground features of cities but rather depict the literalized street itself as a status signifier—an editorial backdrop against which to emphasize fashions.Résumé | Depuis le milieu des années 2000, les blogues de mode de rue ont documenté la mode individualisée dans les grandes métropoles. Leur popularité ne cessant d’augmenter, les photographes de rue et blogueurs se sont tournés vers l’évolution du style vestimentaire, et ce, en dehors des défilés des capitales mondiales de la mode. Le Mois de la mode est un événement bisannuel consacré au prêt-à-porter féminin avec des présentations à New York, Londres, Milan et Paris. S’appuyant sur les travaux de Bourdieu, les spécialistes de la mode soutiennent que chaque Semaine de la mode est une matérialisation du domaine de la mode (Entwistle and Rocamora). Ce rassemblement exclusif peut également être décrit en tant que scène. Cet arti