The candid street photographs showcasing amazing looks

How street-style photography has evolved from the Edwardian era to today. Now it is exploding – and turning fashion upside down.

Jessica Chastain, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Parker Posey were among the stars attending the recent autumn/winter 2025 Gucci fashion show, but the photographers weren't chasing them down outside. Instead, they jammed the ancient, moss-cracked alleys of Milan shouting, "Chloe!" "Chloe!".

"It still makes me nervous," says the Chloe in question, a Boston-born stylist and retail director named Chloe King who has become the fashion industry's version of a reality star: a street-style star. "It's not an easy job," King tells the BBC. "But I think street style really is the best part of fashion, because it's people living and breathing it, and customising their outfits to their personalities, not just what they're shown on a runway."

"People got very obsessed with street style outside of fashion shows about 10 years ago," says Vogue photographer Acielle Tanbetova, known online as Style Du Monde. "It kind of dawned on everyone that putting on your own clothes could be more exciting than copying what's on a runway. And that's really revolutionised the industry."

Today, mass-market brands like Gap and J Crew shoot campaigns that mimic street-style shots, while luxury labels like Tod's and LaPointe stage catwalk shows created to look like casual strolls through Milan and Manhattan. "People see themselves reflected in street style a lot more," says King, noting that street style allows women of all sizes to participate in fashion's dreamworld, even as casting of plus-size runway models is on the decline. "You need all of these voices and points of view to accurately reflect what's going on in fashion – you need a really diverse group of photographers outside the shows, because they each bring a unique eye." 

That sense of inclusion is a throughline from today's street-style photographers back to the genre's early pioneers. Before street style became fashion's favourite way to translate trends in real life, it was a rare point of entry for women seeking to enter the world of photography.

First seen in women's magazines in the early 1900s, early street-style photography centred on aristocrats at French racetracks and seaside retreats. Most iconic: the graphic black-and-white striped dresses by French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, which ran in the fashion publication Les Modesin 1912, and served as inspiration for Cecil Beaton's My Fair Lady costumes in 1964. 

While Lartigue was shooting the gowns of socialites at the Auteuil racecourse, Scottish photographer Christina Broom was photographing a broader spectrum of women's fashion across the British Isles. That included the all-white suffragette skirts of women's rights marchers, the cinched-waist jackets of London's first female police brigade and the tartan wraps of Labour politicians like Barbara Ayrton-Gould. (She wore the giant accessory in 1909 while supporting worker's rights for fishermen. Today, Grazia global editor Joseph Errico says, "She looks like she's in a Burberry ad.")

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Ten years later, the photographer Marianne Breslauer captured young sunbathers lounging in Germany and smoking cigarettes in Paris, documenting the nascent freedoms of twenty-something women that would soon be snuffed out by the Nazi regime. In doing so, she captured the emerging styles of the era – skin-tight bathing costumes made, for the first time, from synthetic fibres instead of wool; exaggerated wide-leg pants in the boyish style of Katharine Hepburn – before they hit mainstream fashion publications. 

In 1951, a French-American photographer named Vivian Meier began photographing people on the streets of New York City, and later, Chicago. While working as a nanny, she created a darkroom and developed film from a Rolleiflex camera, with subjects including telephone operators en route to work, Park Avenue matriarchs shopping for veiled hats, and teenage girls chatting in Cadillacs, wearing breezy gingham dresses. Though kept in her private collection until after her death, Meier's negatives were discovered at a storage locker auction in 2007, and published on the photo-sharing site Flickr, to great critical acclaim.  

That same year, Tanbetova launched Style du Monde, one of the first street-style blogs created by a female photographer. "People got very obsessed around 10 years ago," Tanbetova tells the BBC. The Soviet-born, Belgian-raised photographer was studying at London fashion school Central Saint Martins when she began photographing her fellow design students outside school buildings and, later, as their careers grew, outside fashion shows. 

"You started seeing these tribes emerge," she explains, ones not unlike high-school cafeteria cliques. There were the Chanel tsarinas with their pink tweed coats and pastel ballet slippers, often topped with quilted leather bows. The goth California coven of Rick Owens, with their black shredded jeans and elegant, witchy velvet capes and blazers. The bookish head girls who stormed Prada with logo-covered leather satchels slung over vintage wool kilts. "It's a bit like people who follow sports teams," Tanbetova says. "You're all rooting for something that's bigger than you are." But instead of a football jersey, fashion fans wear a jersey-knit dress by Dior. 

As one of the only women on the street-style photography scene, Tanbetova is aware her perspective is distinctive – though she insists her colleagues, including fellow Vogue photographer Phil Oh and Tommy Ton, are just as innovative. "I guess for me, I knew how I wanted to dress, and I understood the commitment it took for these other women to find exactly the right pieces and wear them in such unique ways, even if they weren't 'trendy' or usual." She admits that in the beginning, it was hard to get people to pose for a street-style shot. "It was more unusual in 2007, 2008," she says. "I would have to say, 'Oh, I love your shoes. Oh, I love those colours together. I think you could inspire other people with your style.' That last one always got them!" she laughs.

"What I understood with street style is how hungry my audience was to see real people doing real things," says Garance Doré, a French photographer from the southern island of Corsica. "Fashion had been confined to the pages of magazines for so long, and now it was about how people would wear these clothes in their real life." Like Tanbetova, Doré began her blog in the early 2000s, first as a fashion illustrator and then as a photographer and stylist. Working alongside other street-style photographers "taught me a lot about connecting with others", says Doré, whose cohort on the early street-style circuit included Tanbetova, Tamu McPherson of All the Pretty Birds, and photojournalist-turned-fashion photographer Kirstin Sinclair. 

"You all get to the fashion show about 30 minutes before it's supposed to start," explains Tanbetova, who receives the show addresses from her assigning editors at Vogue, or from the design houses directly. (Newer street-style photographers without such connections often keep in touch with each other through WhatsApp channels to share information.) "It's not like a red carpet, where everyone has assigned spots. You just find the place that works for you, which might be on a side street next to some trash cans, you know? It shouldn't be 'perfect'. It should be more real." King says the authenticity is key to a good street-style shot. "There is a candidness and real-time nature to the photos. What really resonates is when the photographer captures a slice of life along with the fashion."  

So what is the secret to spotting those tiny moments? "I think because we live in the clothes, too," says Tanbetova, who likes to wear Rick Owens's slip-on black sneakers for Adidas when she's working. When I catch McPherson outside Tod's show in Milan, she sports a pair of of-the-moment black loafers. "We have places to be!" she exclaims, but also, trends to set.

As an editor-in-chief and stylist, Errico says that street-style photographs "always" influence his creative vocabulary, especially when he's dressing influential celebrities like Sienna Miller and Gisele Bundchen. "How are kids wearing their clothes right now? Are their jackets being worn off their shoulders, or do they only have one arm through their tops? Is everyone layering up or going sheer?"

Meanwhile, in a bit of snake-eats-tail irony, Tanbetova has been asked by major fashion houses to shoot their catwalk models as if they're street-style stars. Scroll through her pictures of the buzzy Miu Miu show in Paris, and you won't see fashion stars like Gigi Hadid and Amelia Gray posing carefully in their catwalk looks. Instead, the models are caught flitting up and down staircases, lingering in hallways, and scurrying into line just seconds before the show starts. "The magic is in those candid moments of anticipation before the runway," she says. "It's so much cooler if you look like you're living in the clothes." 

Street style has also led to avenues far beyond the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. After nearly a decade photographing street style in New York, London, Milan and Paris, in 2022 Doré moved to California and created an eponymous beauty brand. The line has been endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow and approved by the Environmental Working Group, but Doré credits its success to her street-style learnings: candid fashion photos "make people want to learn more about you", she says. "I think it's the same with a beauty brand." Does she miss the street-style scene? "I loved it," she says. "But there are incredibly talented women on the scene now. It's their turn."

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