During New York Fashion Week, the fashion industry’s semi-annual marketing blitz, where designers’ collections are previewed six months before they hit the stores, most of those pedestrians are on their way to and from shows (see fig. 3). There are buyers for department stores and retail websites, editors for fashion magazines, journalists with notebooks in hand, hair stylists and make-up artists, models still made up in the palette of a previous show. There are even the occasional celebrities — A- list through D- list — shopping for gowns for awards season.

The photographers don’t always know who is who among the passing crowd. Some social (media) climbers take advantage of that ambiguity. If they get shot by the right people, they might end up on Vogue.com or Refinery29. They might make some Fashion Week best-dressed list. They might forge an unlikely fashion career out of “street style stardom” (Luvaas, “Internet Famous in Real Life: Becoming a Street Style Star at New York Fashion Week”), become minor online celebrities, famous for their look. Michelle Harper managed that feat. So did Nick Wooster. Now they wield “free agent” entrepreneur status in the industry, “VIP” stamped on their party invitations. Maybe the usurpers, too, can cross that invisible line that separates the fashion industry from everyone else, fake being “somebody” until they actually are.

            There is no uniformity to the styles that pass by, no one single demographic represented. There are industry insiders — mostly white, mostly women — in outfits loaned to them by brands and designed to demonstrate their elegant restraint. There are self-conscious outsiders — many Black, many brown, some gender fluid, some trans — flaunting their street style as a means of being noticed on “their own terms” (Polhemus). They create their own “counterimages” to popular representation, then parade them in front of the lens (Kelley ix). Their very presence in these exclusive industry spaces is a political statement (Solnit 214), a mild form of provocation. There are also rich kids showing off their luxury duds, rappers signalling their ascent into high fashion. There are hundreds of games of distinction (Bourdieu) playing out on these sidewalks. The photographers freeze them into still frames (see Barthes Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography; Sontag) like accidental anthropologists (see fig. 6).

            Most of the photos the photographers take are candid shots of people in motion. They focus on gestures — the inhale of a cigarette (see fig. 5 and fig. 7), the keying of a phone (see fig. 8) — those intimate acts of bodily hexis that challenge or re-inscribe social difference (Bourdieu). These are practiced gestures, acted out in front of a mirror before the events, done repeatedly in the privacy of one’s home until they become second nature (Pham). Only then are they suitable for public consumption, once the performance is so thoroughly embodied there is no distance between it and them (Butler). The labour behind such acts of self-stylization is invisible (Duffy; Pham). It’s meant to be. It would be a less convincing performance if it weren’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s not work. The people who attend these shows have worked hard to make their gestures count, to perfect their look (Wissinger), to gain mastery over the gaze of others. They stylize their movements, enhance the rhythmicality of their walks. They do their best to draw the eyes of the photographers, then pretend to ignore them once they have. It is a kind of gentleperson’s agreement between them.

  “The streets,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his classic essay on the Parisian flâneur, “are the dwelling place of the collective,” that “eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that — in the space between the building fronts — experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls” (423). “For this collective,” he went on to write, “glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their ‘Post No Bills’ are its writing desk” (Benjamin 423). But what are the slapdash collective of New York Fashion Week writing at those desks? A soliloquy? A paean to urban living?  A postcard home? Or just a scrappy paper sign, reading “Look at me, please!”

            People come to New York City from all parts of the world to appear in front of these walls — Hong Kong, Paris, Japan, Sudan (see fig. 9) — though the walls were most likely not what they were imagining when they came. For them, New York was still brownstones and gothic high-rises, some vague promise of cinematic romance. They will leave with quite a different impression. The walls will become permanently associated with New York, a backdrop, a prop, a barrier.When I see that muddled dark blue or green in the background of other peoples’ street style photographs, I recognize New York immediately (see fig. 10 and fig. 11).

            The runways of New York Fashion Week, fashion journalists like to say in knowing, breathy voices, are no longer where the action is. Outside is. The sidewalks are the new catwalk (Menkes; Yarhi; Yi). Brands parade their wares on the borrowed bodies of self-appointed ambassadors. Magazines feature nearly as much coverage of the scene outside the shows as the outfits that walk within them. That’s why there are so many photographers out there, shooting off twelve frames per second, and selling their whittled down images to W, i-D, and Elle. That’s why so many wannabe influencers show up in their outlandish getups. The sidewalk is where you build your reputation as a street style star (Luvaas, “Internet Famous in Real Life: Becoming a Street Style Star at New York Fashion Week”; Luvaas, Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging). It’s where you get discovered by an industry with a notoriously insular gaze. Even the editors, once safely ensconced in simple black, huddled with their notebooks in the corners of the runway (Menkes), recognize the power of the sidewalk. They too dress up to be seen on it. They too build their brands on social media engagement, leverage their followings to maximize their market appeal.  But that doesn’t mean they don’t resent the new job requirements. Editors now have to carry out the never-ending “glamour labour” (Wissinger) once reserved for models and stylists.

            Of course, the sidewalks have always been where urban style takes place (Hebdige; Polhemus; Sennett, The Fall of Public Man), those spaces of transience through which the city’s inhabitants pass in a state of alternately-conscious somnambulance (Benjamin).

            Most of the people attending New York Fashion Week pass by these walls without notice. No photographer singles them out. No editor selects them for media coverage. Some populations seem particularly invisible to the lens: Black and brown people, LGBTQ youth, women over the age of 50, anyone over size 6 (Mears; Sadre-Orafai). They sidestep a human barrier of young Nordic blondes to make their way to the entrance. Other populations find themselves in momentary favour: Asian twenty-somethings with a distinctly middle-brow sensibility, the imagined key to opening up a huge new market without alienating an old one (Pham). The sidewalks, that is, are structured by the same racial hierarchies as elite fashion magazines and the personal blogosphere (Pham). Not everyone can make the sidewalk work for them. Not everyone can get the cameras to click for them. Not everyone can be a social media star.

            And not everyone can stand what they become if they succeed in doing so: a two-dimensional representation that ossifies what was once fluid. Likes are addictive, followers like drugs (Marwick; Turkle). Once you figure out your thing and build a following around it, your followers expect you to stick to it; and once you stick to it, it’s no longer clear that it’s yours at all. It gets harder and harder to express yourself when your personal brand is locked in to one particular look or scheme. Self becomes trapped in a wardrobe of its own creation. The city becomes a cage.

The city, claims Roland Barthes, is a text, and those who move through it are both its readers and its writers (“Semiology and Urbanism”; see fig. 14 and fig. 16). What message do these makeshift walls impart? What is the meaning of their text?