The most photographed clothes in the world are not on a runway. They are on a pavement outside a show, in the nine minutes before the doors close, worn by people who were not paid to be there.
The commercial machinery around the format has changed what gets photographed. When a look is worth money to a brand, the pavement turns into an inventory of placements, and the photographer becomes a distribution channel.
Simbarashe Cha, the New York Times photographer and style columnist, joins Imran Amed on the BoF Podcast this week to talk about the practice behind that nine minutes. His subject is not taste. It is repetition.
The consequence for the industry is a slow correction. A photograph of a coat that a reader could plausibly own does more commercial work than a photograph of a coat that exists in one size.
What the episode leaves you with is a working method rather than a verdict. Practice makes permanent: the frames you take are the frames you have trained yourself to see.
