Fashion Garments

You could tell from the fellow in the T-shirt that said “Craves Hedi Slimane’s Return” that it was a shamelessly fashion-conscious crowd. And the way everybody had thumb and forefinger clamped onto some kind of image-making gadget suggested they were also a picture-hungry lot.

These were the fans who last week lined up at Holt Renfrew to meet Scott Schuman, a blogger whose unembarrassed interest in clothes and unapologetic appetite for visuals have made him a star.

While in Toronto, he snapped some local fashion types who will be among the 100 people from around the world who are to be shown expressing their personal style in a trench coat.

Schuman started his site in 2005. He called it The Sartorialist, which sounds like it could be a character out of Batman. But Schuman was not joking, nor was he out to play judge. Instead, he assumed the part of Everyman, posting pictures from the streets of New York and proclaiming style to be a democracy governed by personal expression.

When did he start making money? “Pretty quick,” he answers, with the speed and candour that, along with democracy, the Internet is so good at.

Schuman’s not the only fashion blogger that Holts has been celebrating in its windows for the month of July. Others include Schuman’s girlfriend Garance Doré and Toronto’s Tommy Ton. All are street shooters whose success on the web has paved a back-to-the-future sort of path to editorials and advertising campaigns in the older but still lucrative medium of print.

As a pioneer, Schuman has been the most important and, as a phenomenon, the biggest and most remarked upon. His site averages 120,000 hits a day. Style.com sends him to the men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections in Milan and Paris to train his pansexual eye not on the shows, but the showgoers. He is a regular contributor to GQ; he has done spreads and portraits for Italian Elle and Interview.

Last year, he landed his first big advertising job with DKNY, and he is at work on a large project for Burberry. Next month, The Sartorialist, an anthology of pictures first presented on his blog, will be published by Penguin. It’s dedicated to his father, writer/director/producer Earl Schuman, who died in April.

He is represented by a well-regarded New York gallery, where last year his first show yielded sales of 50 prints, at $1,200 (U.S.) each. Now, he guesses, they’re probably going for more like $2,000.

Schuman – never mind the gentlemanly Ralph Lauren suit and the shirt that he identifies as “old-school Italian” – gives the impression that he could become a handful if he chose to. His fondness for shoes worn without socks marks him as a member of the fashion brotherhood that also includes Thom Browne, Tom Ford and Joe Mimran, but he’s got an eager edge, more reckless and less abstemious than what the look implies.

Moreover, though he’s engaged by the aesthetics of photographs, paying increasing attention to drama, light and motion, his physique is not that of your average aesthete. Instead, he’s built like a bulldog, low to the ground and broad through the chest.

In his work, Schuman favours romance over reality. He’s capable of loving a mix of herringbone or plaid, obsessing over the cuff on a pair of jeans and practically swooning over a boutonniere. In person, he talks tougher. “I don’t have a lot of friends. I don’t go out of my way to make friends. I think that’s one of the reasons I shoot a lot of people. It’s because they seem `other’ to me.”

As a veteran of fashion sales and marketing, who ran his own New York showroom until “09/11 created a problem with stores not paying,” knows what hard-nosed is. A chaser of cool, he’s used to the cold. As a documentarian, he’s not interested in having a lot of chat with his subjects. And while he’s grateful in a showbizzy, without-you-I’m-nothing sort of way for the audience who found him on the Internet, he is not sentimental in assessing the usefulness of the medium.

“The blog really became my portfolio,” admits Schuman, “People ask, `Are you going to replace magazines?’ I say, `No.’ If blogs continue to be something you can do free, I think they’ll become like a minor league for more established magazines.”

When it comes to actual athletics, Schuman says he doesn’t have the patience to watch a whole game, but he plans to follow the spectator sport of fashion for no less than “forever.” That’s his romantic side talking, promising that if “the girl’s walking and the wind’s blowing and the light’s right, I’ll take that picture.”