And Fashion Week Drags on to Day Seven

Blah blah Fashion Week blah blah. By now the collective intelligence of the Internet has done as much thinking as it needs to do about New York Fashion Week. Too many Instagrams of runway shows. Too many selfies of wannabe starlets with a New York skyline in the background. Too many sweeping proclamations about Fall trends and "the next big thing." And yet there's still another day to go. It was 92 degrees in New York City for Day Seven. The bloggers were sticky and wet. The models were bedraggled and worn. The editors were already thinking about London and Milan. Just about all of us had already had enough of New York Fashion Week.

I've shot an awful lot of models these past few days. Here's another one, posing for photographers after Reed Krakoff. I'll be putting up the best of these shots in the days to come. 

Japanese Vogue editor Anna Della Russo arrived at Fashion Week only a day or two ago. Fashionably late, of course. The bloggers missed her and swarmed her today at every opportunity. This is the best shot I managed to get without punching anyone in the face. In a season where dressing down is the norm, Anna most certainly did not.

The big story to emerge out of New York Fashion Week Day Seven was that a freight elevator got stuck between floors at the show for Philosophy di Alberta Feretti. A number of high-profile editors and assorted other fashion industry big-wigs were on board. This being 2013, they all started Instagraming it immediately. I wasn't there, but word spread fast among the bloggers. Adam Katz Sinding of Le 21eme later relayed the events to me. He was a bit shaken by it, not because anyone was in any imminent danger. They weren't. But when it happened, he was stuck next to the elevator and offered to help lift a bunch of people out. No one would take his help, presumably because he's a photographer in an industry with a deep ambivalence towards photographers.  And so, with nothing else for him to do, he took a picture of the event on his iPhone, not to sell to magazines (he has a Nikon D4 for that) but just for personal recollection. When the elevator resumed operation, and the passengers stepped off, several of them called him "a fucking asshole" and worse. Several then proceeded to give him the cold shoulder at shows that afternoon. I heard Adam shout out an apology t one of the elevator passengers outside Reed Krakoff. But it was To no avail. The woman in question stomped by without so much as looking at him. So Adam feels terrible about doing what more or less everyone was doing in the situation (and which also happens to be his job), taking a picture.

My itinerary today began at Lincoln Center for the crowds exiting Michael Kors and the ones entering Nanette Lepore. I then walked down to 55th St for Proenza Schouler. When that was over, I hopped in a cab with three other photographers over to Chelsea Market. We got lunch and walked over to shoot Jeremy Scott. That was a big event in February, attracting all sorts of awesome freaks. This time it was a bit more mellow, a few scant club kids in neon. So I headed up a few blocks to 22nd St for Reed Krakoff instead. To end my day, I ran up to Lincoln Center again briefly, where I took exactly zero shots during the exit of Betsey Johnson. I then hopped on the bus home.  

New York Street Style? Or Models Off Duty?: Shooting Down the Street from Reed Krakoff, 22nd St

I took these shots one block away from the runway show of Reed Krakoff on 22nd St in New York City. I wasn't in front of the entrance. I wasn't huddled with the other photographers. Is this, then, street style, in the old-fashioned sense of the term? Other folks seemed to think so. I wasn't the only lone wolf street style photographer roaming the area around the event, looking for "impromptu" shots of "real people on the streets." You get better ambience that way: grafittied walls, backdrops of Chelsea with no other pedestrians stepping into your shot. And you get to keep your street style integrity more or less intact. I  have to say, though, shooting near runway events feels a little like stacking the decks, especially when, as in these pictures, the people you just happen to capture out walking the streets also happen to work as professional models. But don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Shooting professional models (and not paying them)is awesome. At least for the photographers. They're easy to work with. Nearly every shot is usable. But it's an open question whether the models get anything out of the deal, especially when photographers like me circulate neither their names nor agency info. Fashion's digital-age economy is built on volunteer, and often anonymous labor. And it's built on the assumption that if we get our image out there enough something amazing will happen for us. And sometimes it does. A Susie Bubble or an Olivia Palermo rises up out the Fashion Week fray every couple of years. They make their name explicitly through being seen over and over again at these events, with their names attached to their image or otherwise. As for everyone else photographed, who knows? Maybe street style photography has become a new form of exploitation, the image standing in for the body subjected to the dictates of labor. After all, we are all of us in the business of self-branding these days. We — as in the collective we of online entrepreneurs — are creative culture's new "precariat," and whether we have longterm careers or not depends in large part on how visible we are out there in the blogosphere. Being visible out there, furthermore, takes a lot of work. The bottom line: get used to not getting paid. That's what happens when everything is free.