Would you wait three hours in a queue just to get a book signed? Tina Antarakis joined a group of fashion blog devotees and endured southerly winds and high-heeled shoes to find out…
SARTORIALIST BOOK-SIGNING IN SYDNEY

Style-conscious Australians everywhere were excited to welcome Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist, street fashion photographer and blogger extraordinaire, back to Australia this week for a lightening- quick round of book signings and street shoots in Sydney and Melbourne.
Looking dapper and immaculately groomed in a navy suit and crisp white shirt, Mr Schuman looked every bit as though he had just stepped straight from the pages of his own recently-launched book, The Sartorialist.

Photo from www.vogue.com.au

He also proved to be as charming and stylish as his photos and blog comments would have you imagine, no mean feat for a man who had been seated at a table signing his name for the better part of three hours, not to mention the pre-signing photos and schmoozing that went on before the regular punters lined up down the street were let in the door.

Photo from Marie Claire Australia

With scarcely a trace of jetlag (although he told the young man ahead of me that since arriving he had only managed one hour’s sleep in the past two days – after complimenting him on his suit and asking where he got it of course), he smiled and joked with me whilst signing my book, and thanked me for waiting so long.
Suddenly the past two and a half hours I had just spent standing outside in the street in high-heeled wedges, handbag leaving red marks on my arm from the weight of his book inside, at the mercy of the merciless eye of photography bloggers melted away. No trouble at all, I assured him, as I realised he must have been feeling a whole lot shabbier than I at this point – although when I think about it, each signature he made represented another book that had been sold, which would be enough to keep up the spirits of even the most jaded of travellers.

The Sartorialist, Scott Schuman, Penguin Books, 2009.

Scott’s work has always been as much about non-designer outfits and the quiet style of ‘regular’ people going about their daily lives as the more obvious fashion show snaps of well-dressed fashion luminaries (such as Carine Roitfeld, Giovanna Battaglia, and Giorgio Armani for example), and the book reflects this philosophy perfectly.

Photo from www.penguin.com.au

Within the covers of this visually rich homage to the temple of sartorial splendour, you will find a complete mix of outfits and idiosyncratic styles – the quirky, the traditional, the eye-catching and the deceptively plain – but all, I think, quite lovingly and often painstakingly put-together on the part of the wearer.

Photo from www.penguin.com.au

Scott’s skill, by his own admission, lies in being able to spot those details about a person’s outfit or demeanour that makes a great shot – because apart from having style in common, what I notice looking through the pages of the book is that a lot of his subjects also have something in their face or their stance that attracts your attention just as much, or even more so, than the clothes.

Photo from www.penguin.com.au

So perhaps this is the key to his success, capturing the essence of a person’s personality or their – and their city’s – mood, rather than just what they chose to wear that day. Whatever it is, it has certainly caught the imagination of people around the world and inspired them to continue dressing in their own, individual way. Not to mention to line up down a busy inner-city street for hours just to have their new style bible autographed by the man himself.
And Scott’s view of Sydneysider’s style? In interviews with The Sydney Morning Herald and Marie Claire Australia this week, he mused that “there is a chic-ness in Sydney that hasn’t been captured yet so it is something I want to focus on.’
“And I think you play against the perception of it being so beach driven. Look at the girls here,” he adds gesturing around the room. “They’ve all got the shoes, the bags, the jackets. This is like Paris in the summer time.”
And there is one man who can single-handedly change the ingrained, ‘beach-bum’ stereotypes about Australian style, this is the one to do it.