So, it’s easy to assume that street style has always been as critical to fashion week culture as the runway shows themselves. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. In the years before social media, fashion weeks were largely attended by industry professionals, like fashion editors and buyers, and the focus of fashion week was more literal: choosing what trends to centre a magazine around and clothes to stock in department stores. In the mid-noughties, that started to change, with a renewed interest in what models wore between shows (thus, birthing the “off-duty model” look) and the Internet offering an immediacy that hadn’t been seen before, through bloggers and later influencers posting from the shows (and outside the shows).
