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Frères Séeberger
Long before anyone called it street style, the Séeberger brothers were picking well-dressed women out of the crowds at Paris race meetings and photographing them where they stood. Fashion magazines printed the pictures as proof of what was really being worn, which is still the basic idea behind every fashion week gallery.
The brothers called this work snapshots of high fashion. Look at the poses: the subjects know they are being photographed but are not in a studio, and that halfway point between candid and posed is exactly where the genre still sits.
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Derek Ridgers
Born
Ridgers started out photographing bands, then turned his camera on the audience in 1976, when punk made the fans more interesting to look at than the musicians. From 1978 he was photographing skinheads and New Romantics too, in the street and in clubs such as the Blitz and Camden Palace.
He worked alone and belonged to none of the scenes, which shows in portraits that are direct without being flattering. This is the place to see subculture style as its wearers put it together, with no designer in sight. The London Youth Portraits is the broadest collection; Skinheads 1979-1984 is the one to pick for that scene alone.
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Steve Johnston (photographer)
Johnston gave street style its most copied format. In 1977 he photographed punks on the King's Road head to toe, standing straight on against plain walls, so the whole outfit read like a specimen rather than a candid snap.
Terry Jones used the pictures in the street fashion section he edited for Not Another Punk Book in 1978, and those straight-ups became the template for i-D, the fanzine Jones founded in 1980. Much of today's full-length street style, shot against a blank wall outside a show, goes back to this.
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Bill Cunningham (American photographer)
Born
If one person made street style a regular part of a newspaper, it was Cunningham. His work with The New York Times began in 1978, and for nearly four decades he rode his bicycle around Manhattan photographing what people actually wore, from society dandies to strangers at a crosswalk.
His pages treated the street as a fashion show in its own right, often catching a trend on ordinary New Yorkers before it reached the stores. He died in 2016, aged 87. The documentary Bill Cunningham New York is the easiest way in; his old On the Street pages show how early he spotted what was coming.
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Jamel Shabazz
Shabazz grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and began photographing at 15 with his mother's cheap Kodak, directing groups of friends into poses. His method was patience: he would often talk to people for ten minutes or more before raising the camera, and he has said he let them know he saw greatness in them.
The result is the definitive record of early hip-hop style on the street: b-boys, boomboxes, big hair and the pride of a well-chosen outfit. Back in the Days, his 2001 book with powerHouse, is the place to start and still the reference for 1980s New York streetwear.
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Amy Arbus
Born
From 1980 to 1990, Arbus shot On the Street, a style page in The Village Voice. Her only brief was to photograph anyone who made her turn her head, and she did, catching downtown New York characters and future stars, Madonna among them before she was famous.
Where Cunningham tracked trends, Arbus made portraits: one person, one look, framed with care. That makes her the bridge between the society snapshot and the subculture portrait. Her book On the Street 1980-1990 collects the best of the decade alongside the original newspaper layouts.
More about Amy Arbus7
Shoichi Aoki
Aoki turned the Harajuku street snap into a magazine format. FRUiTS, which he founded in 1997, was little more than full pages of young people photographed as they were, and every month he and his team shot about 80 of them, working by instinct with no fixed spot.
It showed the world Tokyo's layered, homemade street fashion years before social media made that kind of exposure easy. He ended the print magazine in 2017, saying there were no more fashionable kids to photograph, which makes the back issues a closed and complete record of an era.
More about Shoichi Aoki8
Scott Schuman
Born
Schuman spent about 15 years in the fashion business, eventually running a showroom for young designers, before starting The Sartorialist in 2005 simply to share pictures of people he thought looked great on the streets of New York.
The blog proved that one person with a digital camera could set the visual tone for the industry, and it turned the well-tailored passerby into a fashion week fixture. His strength is putting people at ease and placing them carefully against their background, so the pictures read as portraits rather than paparazzi shots. Start with his early New York pictures, before the show crowds took over.
More about Scott Schuman9
Tommy Ton
Born
Ton, a Canadian photographer, began with his blog Jak & Jil and went on to become the go-to street style photographer for Style.com, shooting for GQ as well. His pictures defined how the crowd outside the shows looked during the years when that crowd became as watched as the runway itself.
He is the one to study for detail: when he left Style.com in 2015 he launched his own site with an archive meant to be sorted by color, brand, trend and subject, cataloged down to every detail. That archive is the best record of the blog-era peacocking at its height.
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Yvan Rodic
Rodic, a Swiss photographer behind the blog Facehunter, took street style out of the four big fashion capitals. He has said his work is about photographing things he would not normally expect to see or like, and he was happiest heading to less obvious cities such as Wellington, Jakarta, Manila or Reykjavik.
That makes him the counterweight to the fashion week regulars on this list: younger, scrappier, more interested in self-invented looks than designer labels. His book Facehunter, published by Thames & Hudson, gathers about five years of his street pictures in 326 images.
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Phil Oh
Oh came to street style with no training in fashion or photography. He started his blog Street Peeper in 2006 with what he called a dinky point-and-shoot, and the pictures were good enough that Vogue's photo director emailed him a few months before the magazine relaunched its website.
He has been shooting for Vogue ever since, and his galleries from outside the shows in New York, Paris, Milan and beyond are a fixture of every fashion week season. Open any recent season of Vogue's street style coverage to see his eye for color and a well-timed stride.
More about Phil Oh12
Garance Doré
Born
Doré, who is originally from Corsica and settled in New York, is a photographer and illustrator who founded an influential style blog under her own name. Her contribution was voice: she approached style through storytelling, mixing her photographs with drawings and personal writing, so street style read as a conversation rather than a catalog of outfits.
Choose her for a softer, more personal take than the fashion week galleries. Love Style Life, her 2015 book, is part memoir and part style guide, illustrated with her own photographs and drawings.
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Ari Seth Cohen
Cohen pointed street style at a group the genre had ignored: people over 60. He started Advanced Style in 2008 to capture the dress sense of New York's senior set, people who live full creative lives and dress like it.
It is the most useful corrective on this list, a reminder that personal style does not stop at 30. His first book, published in 2012, has sold more than 150,000 copies, and the Advanced Style documentary directed by Lina Plioplyte follows several of his subjects off the sidewalk and into their lives.
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