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Fashion has a lot to do with artifice. The appeal of street-style photos is that they are based in real life and so can be more exhilarating than even the most gorgeous, perfectly produced photo shoot. They emphasize that fashion can be as much a part of reality as we choose to make it.
Other bloggers shoot their own ensembles, so I suppose you could argue that they’re “staged,” but only in the sense that they’re trying to make an attractive record of what they’re actually wearing. The teenage blogger of Karla’s Closet certainly looks like she could be a model or an actress, but that doesn’t make her choices any less valid. Same for the people profiled in Show Me Your Wardrobe. A pixielike preteen in Oak Park named Tavi Gevinson caused a stir in the street-style blogosphere last summer when her online recording of her pretty amazing wardrobe experiments was featured in the New York Times’s T magazine. I don’t think she’s using a stylist.
