A Big Think Interview with Scott Schuman | Big Think

A Big Think Interview with Scott Schuman

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A conversation with The Sartorialist, an influential fashion blogger.

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Scott Schuman:

After launching the now famous "Sartorialist" blog in 2005, Scott Schuman has emerged as an influential force in the world of fashion. A self-taught photographer, Schuman shoots for publications including French Vogue, American GQ, Fantastic Man and Elle, and a growing list of advertising clients. He has also shown his work at the New York photo gallery The Danziger Projects and appeared in the GAP Style Icon campaign in the fall of 2008. He has been named the number one fashion photography trend by American Photo magazine, as well as one of Time magazine’s top 100 design influencers. Penguin published an anthology of his favorite photographs in 2009. The hardcover collection is aptly entitled, "The Sartorialist."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What drew you to fashion?

Scott Schuman: What made me want to work in fashion? When I was growing up I played sports like all the regular kids in the Midwest, boys in the Midwest and would read Sports Illustrated and you know read all about all the athletes that I liked and kept reading that what they were spending their money on, you know cars and music and fashion and you know, so I’d start picking up those magazines and I think I ended up becoming more interested in fashion than I did sports and the better I dressed the more attention I seemed to get from women, which was more attention than what I was getting on the football field.

Question: How did you get into blogging?

Scott Schuman: The blogging part was pretty easy. I had an idea for “The Sartorialist”, this idea of mixing photographs of guys that I knew were stylish with guys that I knew were fashionable, which are two different things, but I only really knew about websites at that time and I knew that a website would take too much time, too many other people would have to be involved and when I happened to be going through the internet I found a blog, just happened to click onto a blog and I’m the kind of person that once I see something interesting I just start hitting all the buttons trying to figure out how they’re doing it and it was an interior design blog actually and I thought it was pretty cool. She had like 30 comments. She had some good visuals up and once I saw that I was able to look at it in an abstract enough way to be able to say I could do this with my photographs. Once I figured out how she was doing it and how simple it was to do I thought that’s the format I want to do. There weren’t really any kind of… definitely I don’t think any street style blogs. Maybe “Face Hunter” was right about that time, but I didn’t really know it in the beginning, but I saw the potential of using a blog as a visual format as opposed to a just text driven. At least I think most of the blogs at that time were very text driven and if they had a little bit of visual it wasn’t very important where for me I thought this would be a great way to put photographs up and then put a little bit of text to create a conversation, but the simplicity is what made the blogging part so… The simplicity and the interaction with the audience were the two things I think make it most attractive.

Question: What is the difference between street fashion and what designers create?

Scott Schuman: The difference between what designers create are you know they’re creating a little world every season, you know head to toe, a full look, shoes bags, dresses, the whole thing whereas street fashion is what people are really wearing. There is an element of new. There is an element of previous seasons. There is your own history, you know your sweatshirt from high school and vintage pieces and it’s that kind of combination that I find so much more interesting than just the runway, but you know and I love fashion. I love going to the runway shows. It’s not so much for me a shopping trip as it is the appreciation of the craft of these design geniuses who come up with beautiful color combinations and beautiful proportion suggestions and these kind of ideas, so I look at the runway shows in very different ways, just kind of a romantic artistic interpretation of how they would like to see fashion going forward, but for me it’s much more abstract. The runway shows are much more abstract than you know what ends up on people is much more real to me.

Question: Are you a fashion insider or a fashion outsider?

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