Two things about Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman are certain: (1) he is the '"blog almighty" of street style, and (2) that Fashion Spot estimation of his short, smokestack stature stands correct.

The first point was settled upon last month when Holt Renfrew unveiled their mannequin and label window interpretation of online fashion and style influencers, dressing up the age-old Bloor Street department store's 60 per-cent-off summer-sale lull. As bloggers become shoe designers and/or muses with designer frocks named in their honour, Holt's windows are a win-win for everyone involved: both store and subject get eyeball traffic PR via bloggers' appreciative posts, further legitimizing (yes, this is still an on-going preoccupation for print dinosaurs) the fash-blog contingent.

Schuman was one of its first stars, a former showroom rep who became the stay-at-home dad post-9/11 and launched The Sartorialist in late 2005. His eye for democratic "permanent fashion" has led to GQ pages, Style.com Fashion Week coverage, DKNY-shot campaigns, and a recent tongue-in-cheek "How to get shot by The Sartorialist" breakdown from Refinery29 Pipeline.

There's also the upcoming September publication of a much-anticipated coffee-table tome by Penguin. The book has an attractive Taschen heft, and the loose Nylon city-and-age-old-trend organization (the androgyny, the bespoke, the very high fashion-editor's heel). The way Schuman's street style photography is translated on page isn't exactly a groundbreaking on-to-offline adaptation but then again, this is about legitimization, and high-res print publishing does remain a far lovelier pixelation to gaze at.



The second point about Schuman's height was confirmed in the time I spent with Schuman yesterday during the back-to-back media interviews that Holt's scheduled for the photog shortly after his Sart-mania-inducing public appearance, but just before his slightly tipsy industry cocktail evening. (Air Canada did lose his luggage, and maybe he was just so overwhelmed by the “chicness, sexiness, genuineness, and subtlies” that was present in the Toronto crowd — as attested by the sight of one woman's jump-worthy sequin zippered Dries Van Noten cuff.)

That Gap Icon ad prepares you for Schuman's neat sidepart and squint stare, but in person, the precious shoulder cut of his pinstripe suit emphasizes a surprising bravado. There's a thin-lipped New Yorker braggaddocio in the playful yet determined request shortly after introductions for a dirty question (“Please? It's five o'clock and I'm waiting for some dirty questions 'cause I'm really bored”) and a plaintive weariness in acknowledging that steady travel is "the regular life" (“I want to get a satin-jacket that says Sartorialist World Tour, and wear it all the time”).

During the half hour conversation, the following topics came up:

1. The appreciation for his readers and the demand to Holt's to cancel media interviews that day so he could hang out a little longer with those that came during their work lunch breaks, or drove all the way from Guelph for one photo with him. (The Holt's publicist claims they just "pushed things back.")

2. The excitement he still gets after four years in turning a corner in New York's Greenpoint and finding a new person to shoot.

3. How to maintain the democratic spirit of shooting different ages and backgrounds on an international stage (“It's not about understanding New York, it's not about understanding Milan — it's about mixing it up and not knowing where you're going to be from page to page”). He picks up the book to flip page to page to page to illustrate said point, pointing to a photo of two men — a black American scholar in Milan, a white French American in Paris — in the exact same herringbone knit cap shot separately a year apart that he told Penguin to lay out opposite each other because it showed “two guys more different, yet more similar.”

4. His criticism of the outfit bloggers and Lookbook.nu style niche communities that have followed his example, but who don't show enough of their lives in the daily outfits they photograph themselves in. (Of Fashiontoast — a prominent outfit blogger who was just signed with Next agency — he says, “She's a beautiful girl: totally hot. [But] I don't feel like you connect with [Fashiontoast's] Rumi. As soon as she gets one wrinkle, she's done. Her style doesn't evolve.”)

5. The development of a photography style that increasingly challenges the perceived reality of his shots. (“Let's be honest. Fashion keeps changing. Right now, reality is very in vogue, but I've been around fashion long enough to realize that reality is part of it, and if I want to continue to evolve, I need to do my version of reality.”)

6. The buzzing vibrations of a Blackberry that Schuman never picked up until after the interview was done and EYE WEEKLY's photographer had taken a few shots of him to go with this story.

Schuman's version of reality still involves (on a good day) spontaneously snapping four or five people in Soho. But it also involves snapping a recurring cast of fashion insiders that are spotted outside the Fashion Week tents alongside an increasingly famous coterie: Toronto-based shoe gazer Tommy Ton (whose Kanye West-and-crew snap was South Park-ed) and French street styler/Schuman's girlfriend Garance Doré. (The pairing was discovered this spring, and resulted in Schuman's wife commenting on New York-based blog fashionologie's announcement that “yes, he was married when the affairt (sic) started” and confirmed divorce proceedings.)

Doré comes up a lot in our conversation: Schuman points to a 2007 photo he shot of her as an illustration of his early style — dead-on, far background, shallow depth of field (“She tells me that this is the very moment she fell in love with me”). But Schuman's more recent photos are increasingly set up. He casually admits to deliberately changing the setting to better illustrate his vision of a person's style (like one photo of an androgynous, cowboy-swaggering girl with in dramatic shadows that he snapped near a tractor just outside the Bowery gallery where they first met). He'll still be sticking around Toronto today to snap street style this afternoon, but he's also “gotta do a Burberry thing and there's certain people I met earlier that I told [Holt Renfrew media relations] Jennifer [Daubney] to get their info” for him to shoot.

“I want to take pictures that are of the moment because it's a blog and it's daily, but at the same time, reflect something that's happening of the moment and stands the test of time,” he says. “And someone will like [that] shot now, and a hundred years from now.”

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1