Fashion blog project tracks street style trends around the world
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When Joie Reinstein graduated with a fashion marketing degree from Parson’s The New School for Design this summer, the dour economy rendered job prospects practically nonexistent.
So instead of groveling for a pay-free internship at a fashion house, she went with her Plan B — traveling the world in an attempt to connnect the dots in global fashion trends by photographing (and contextualizing) urban street style on her blog, Pattern Recognition.
Reinstein, 29, named the one-woman endeavor Radicant Fashion — a radicant is a plant that creates roots and adapts to its environment as it moves along, which Reinstein likens to ‘the very definition of a modern trend.’
At the tail end of her jaunt, she’s in L.A., having snapped the hyper-styled set throughout the streets of New York, Paris, London, Helskini, Copenhagen, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Rounding out the tour will be Rio and, ‘hopefully,’ Sao Paulo.
Though each city interprets trends a little differently, Reinstein said she’s found more commonalities in the way people dress around the world than differences — and offered a hypothesis of sorts: ‘Through the Internet we share more and more references,’ she said. ‘As a result, we’re becoming more and more on the same page in terms of what we do with fashion. And fashion is a barometer for what’s going on in the world.’
Reinstein, who, all told, will have spent four months on the project once it’s finished, said she’s less interested in brands and more interested in the elements of identity and culture encoded in the way people festoon themselves.
‘I feel style is something anyone can have anywhere and it’s not about money,’ she said.
In the end, Reinstein — who’s hoping to land a job in trend forecasting once the project is complete — hopes to pull together all the data (in this case, where floor-length skirts made their latest debut, etc.) and ‘make a big conclusion.’
And even perhaps discover the long answer for a butterfly wings-style question she posed at the start of the project: ‘Does what a guy in Rio wear affect what a girl wears on the Lower East Side of New York?’
See photos from our Street Fashion photographer Colin Young-Wolff on our Street Fashion page here.