Inspired by Bill Cunningham, I hit the streets to look at men and their manbags!
I was super psyched this past Spring, when I saw that a friend (LaShaia Artis) of mine was featured in On the Street, in the New York Times. The iconic Sunday NYT feature is shot by the legendary Bill Cunningham! Cunningham has been documenting street style for 30 years, waaaaay before bloggers were ever doing it, and he still does it in his 70’s, on his bicycle!
This particular On the Street, was inspired by women experimenting with elaborate hairstyles decorated with jewels; à la Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Renaissance portraits. You can see Bill Cunningham’s images and his explanation for this particular feature here.
Getting to the point, so back in February, while learning about Cunningham in a class, we were given an assignment to document a particular fashion in a street style. With the energy of Fashion Week permeating the city’s winter streets, there were a couple of ideas that had popped in my head. Always a sucker for leather, I was going to initially focus on leather details, then unusual prints, or bold colors in winter’s sea of black. But at the very last minute it became clear to me; the ‘manbag’ or the ‘murse,’ (i hear men hate that term). In NYC a man bag is quite a normal site, but during Fashion Week, it’s probably as ubiquitous as wearing shoes.
Here are some of my shots, inspired by the Cunningham assignment. This was quite a quick assignment, but I had lots of fun chatting with people, I wonder if Cunningham like the chatting part as well….
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