“Street Style Culture”

It’s an asphalt jungle where jeans come true; New York City is a kaleidoscope of scenes where jeans of all shapes and sizes hug us and carry us across its grid. Skinny, boot cut, flared, cropped, baggy, skintight, ripped—our jeans tell us a little something about what we’re made of beneath their seams.

I have a pair of jeans I wear almost every day. They’re ripped at the knees with gauzy white fabric poking out through the holes and a raw hem that ends just below the ankle. I love them because in them I am exactly who I want to be; the irrepressible power of clothes is that they dress even our most fantastical self-images.

The strength of street style is in its innumerable choices. Street style bloggers Phil Oh of “Street Peeper,” Scott Schuman of “The Sartorialist,” and Caroline Blomst of “Stockholm Street Style” stalk the streets of New York (and other fashion capitals) celebrating the choices of strangers who are decked out in all sorts of jeans with stories beneath them. Street style is about escaping and embracing categories and creating drama. It’s about eccentricity and self-expression, about wearing clothes that fit well, that comfort us, clothes we can carry through our days that embrace us like a perfect pair of jeans.

Street style is both a subculture and a process of escaping it. With hippies, punks, skaters, hipsters, and countless other categories come their sartorial expressions, and trends begin to stand for movements. Street style, however, is often trendless. Italian fashion journalist and street style celebrity Anna Dello Russo pops up on blogs in waves of chaotic colors and exaggerated silhouettes—a trendsetter by not following trends.

In New York City, street style is a culture dominated by contradictions: by change and timelessness, the classical and modern, by being in motion while standing still for a photo. When I wear my favorite pair of jeans, I am the contradictions that make me up. I am so much like my jeans, or maybe my jeans are like me because I chose them.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol