Sydney vs Melbourne fashion
By Sarah McInerney | smh.com.au | 28 April
The Sartorialist...Scott Schuman.
When it comes to style, Sydney women have the sexiness angle covered while their Melbourne counterparts express a more intellectual aesthetic, at least according to style critic Scott Schuman.
The New Yorker, who writes the influential blog The Sartorialist, is attending Australian Fashion Week in Sydney courtesy of Tourism Australia.
He spent a few days in Melbourne before arriving for the festival and shared with Life & Style his initial observations on the style differences between Australia's two largest cities.
"The girls here [in Sydney] are sexy and beautiful and they celebrate their femininity where I think in Melbourne I think it is much more intellectual," he said.
"Even though there's a lot of beautiful girls there, I think there must be that rivalry where they want to be more intellectual."
He said Melbourne women had a "very serious" style preferring "over design" along the lines of Comme Des Garcons and Yohji Yamamoto and flats over heels.
"A lot of times they kind of dummy it down a bit and kind of dowdy it down, which to me I don't find that romantic," he said
"Where here [in Sydney] they work out hard, they are beautiful girls and they really play that up. But somewhere in each place there's that difference. Heels and all that don't always make the look."
Schuman started his site about three years ago during a break from his career in fashion marketing. What began as "just kind of a goof", taking photos of stylish people on the streets of New York, is now compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in fashion. It was rated one of Time Magazine's top 100 design influencers and has seen Schuman become the face of advertising campaigns and travel the world attending fashion events. He now has a book in the works.
The concept behind his blog differs from other fashion offerings in that it steers clear of runways and celebrities. Instead Schuman focuses on street photography, snapping people he comes across in the cities he visits. Their ages and occupations vary widely but they do have one thing in common, a great sense of style.
The two photos posted on his site on Saturday from Melbourne illustrate the diverse range of people from which he finds inspiration. One is young woman in her 20s dressed all in black and the other is an older man in his 60s.
"It turned out he was a tailor on Chapel St in Melbourne, and he just had the most unusual jacket and it turns out he tailored it himself," he said.
"It was just totally unusual and he must have done it in 1960 or something and he was still wearing it and was still very much part of his style. I had to explain to him what it [the blog] was and I'm sure he'll never quite understand what it is that I do but the shot's great. That's the kind of character that keeps me going.
"It's easier to find fashion people at fashion week looking around the shows, but it's harder and more rewarding to find a guy like that who has really developed his own personal style."
A photographer at heart, the visual output is of utmost importance to Schuman. During the first day of Australian Fashion Week in Sydney he spotted a few candidates but was struggling to find the right light and background.
"Sometimes it's the look, sometimes it's the posture," he said. "There's a girl here that I want to try and shoot when I find the right spot and the right light. Her outfit's great, [but] it's just this posture that she has, I know she's going to come up great in a picture, she's just got a romanticism about her that really translates sometimes."
His hopes for fashion week are to see great examples of how Australian designers incorporate the unique aspects of the lifestyle and landscape in their work.
"I'd love to see Australian designers see the romance of their own city," he said.
"That's one of the reasons why I was invited here was to take pictures of how an outsider sees Australia and the romance of it. I would love to see a bunch of collections that aren't really derivative of anything else in Europe, maybe they are kind of on trend and have a sense of what's going on, but still capture the romance and the physicality or the remoteness, whatever it is that makes Australia special."
First published by Smh.com.au on April 28 2009
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