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This involved exploring new corners of India several times a year for over four years, and capturing hundreds of shots at music festivals, sports events, in small villages, and big cities. Kolkata was one of his favourite places to shoot. The Sartorialist. India , Schuman says, is a visual journey of India with beautiful portraits of all kinds of different people.
However, clothing is only one element of the photographs. I love the world and photographing people in general, and hopefully [people] see my work now as more of a street photographer with a very good fashion point of view. Schuman has travelled all over the world, visiting Peru, China, Bali, Africa, and India, among many other countries. He says he always comes away realizing that people are very similar in the sense that we want our kids to thrive, and to take care of our families.
And I wasn't percent sure I'd be able to do it the way I wanted to do it because I wanted to shoot tribal, I also wanted to shoot very simple, and also kind of high-end — people who live a kind of very dramatic lifestyle because India's such a growing economy. And I looked for books that had done something like that and was very happy that I didn't find one, one that showed not only a very simple way of life but also the growing youth culture and the growing middle class.
So I started shooting for probably two years. Whenever I had a little free time, I'd go there and go into a city and spent time shooting, in Mumbai, and then a small village, and then somewhere else.
So it took a while for me to prove to myself that I was going to be able to make the mix that I wanted. So once it started going the way that I wanted, I started selling the book. I didn't even show anyone any of that work, and I didn't even put it on Instagram, which is tricky because when you have an audience — I don't have to post all the time, but you wanna be giving them an idea of what you're doing and showing them new images.
But I kind of wanted to keep this under wraps. So that was another level of trickiness. With all my books, I think I always try to treat all the styles with equal respect. But it was just fascinating going through these places. I do a lot of studying — what region have I not been to yet, what's going to look different.
I didn't want to do just a bunch of tribal, or a bunch of young kids, so I really tried to shoot a lot of different things.
So I did sports, I did music festivals, I went surfing, I went to tiny little villages. So it was really great — it was a really great challenge, and I always loved those times when I would go from Paris Fashion Week in March, staying at a very chic hotel to the next day when I'm in the middle of India, not really close to any big cities, and it's totally different. I really loved that contrast, to be in two such different things, and to have to communicate in such a different way.
In Paris a lot of people know me, but in India, the way you interact with people's totally different. So it was really a fun challenge. The new book is a great mashup of your images as well as a style guide for the modern man. Did you sense a hole in the market amongst menswear literature for something like this? I knew there were a lot of guides out there, but they seemed like they were always very traditional.
It was always very 'suited,' it was always kind of putting down fashion in a way. And I just didn't feel that there was one that kind of married fashion and style and treated both equally respectfully.
And they're only really interesting when you're comparing and contrasting, but you're doing it in such a way that one can tell you respect both ways.
I just hadn't seen a book like that. It's the same thing I did with the India book, with any of the other ones — I have to kind of go out and prove to myself that there's nothing quite like that, and that there's a reason to do the book.
So I thought it would be great to do a book that shows innate style and classic style, but then push that right up against hardcore fashion. And also to have illustrations, because I still think fit is very important. For someone like me — I'm 53 — I've gotten to the point where I just want things to look nice. I don't necessarily need to be fashionable, but I just want to look nice, and that's about fit. And I do think you can wear fashionable clothes and try to make them fit and look good on you.
I think the tricky part for a lot of fashion people is they think, 'Oh, so-and-so designed that, I shouldn't touch it, I shouldn't do anything to it — I should just wear it the way they designed it. They look fashionable, but it doesn't necessarily look great on them. So I think with this book I tried to help guys take back the power and say, 'I can be fashionable and look great. But a lot of it was looking at books that have already come out and deciding, 'That doesn't seem relevant anymore,' 'I don't think I need to go deeply into this I really tried to think about a guy who's coming out of college, starting to make his money, and wants to look nice but also wants to be a little fashionable, and also be sustainable.
So those were all kind of the ideas behind doing that book. That being said, do you feel there's a lower price limit to a quality suit? How should a younger guy who's just coming into the workforce, say, approach this? It's a lot of little things. You can spend almost any amount. Right now, I think I'm wearing all Uniqlo.
Uniqlo does great dress shirts, they do great knitwear, they do great casual wear. Their jackets and stuff aren't that great. But if you spend a little extra — and I think the problem a lot of guys have, as well as women, is that they don't want to spend that much on tailors, and to have things altered.
That's why I did this whole thing in the book about 'respect for the alterist. Or, buy vintage. One of my favorite photographs from the third book was a kid in South Africa who would just go buy vintage suits and then take them to the tailor and have them really recut, because he was such a slim guy. And maybe they didn't look perfect on him, but the guy looked great because he was so happy with them.
There was something about his pride in wearing them that made it so charming. But I think you can buy something at almost any price now and make it look pretty good. The onset of COVID and working from home seems to have coincided neatly with a slide into ever more casual menswear. Have you noticed an exacerbation of this trend because of the virus? I think it's a natural evolution — I just think it was sped up a little bit with the virus. Already, doing the research for the men's book, one thing you learn right away is that sports has always been the catalyst that changed the way men dressed.
So whether it was way back with horse riding, or golf, and now it's basketball and football — now guys are into those kind of fabrications, shorts and stuff like that — so I'm not that surprised that we continue to get more casual, because a tuxedo is just a more casual version of a more formal dress, of a long jacket with tails.
So we're always getting more casual, we're always being influenced by sports. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I think the thing that we're missing right now, the thing that makes it seem a little jarring, is that when you would wear a suit or something a little bit more tailored, maybe you had a beautiful wool jacket in a plaid with a cotton striped shirt and a silk dotted tie with great flannel pants. So that outfit had a lot of texture, and it had a lot of pattern — it was something to look at.
Guys who dressed really great, it was a chance for them to really show their artistry, how they put together those combinations of stripe and pattern and plaid and all that, and I thought it was really beautiful. That's one thing I've always appreciated when I'm shooting. But with sportswear, if you go into a Nike , if you go into a lot of these places, the clothes right now are so solid. This makes it really boring for the most part — when was the last time you saw a beautiful plaid hoodie?
There's no reason that a hoodie can't be plaid, there's not reason that sweatpants can't be plaid, or a t-shirt. When you think back to the '70s, there was a lot of knitwear — it was very, very big, but it was always these beautiful colors and patterns and all of this. I think it's gonna be fine if we get to the point where we're wearing more casual clothes and things like that, but I think the designers and the audience have to catch up, to say 'Even though I'm wearing sweatpants, I still want to have the fun and the artistry of working with different textures and colors and patterns and all of that.
Now when a guy walks in wearing a pair of grey or black sweatpants, they're not that beautiful, they're just sweatpants. But imagine if they started doing it more in stretch wool, or they were striped, or they were plaid, or whatever. There used to be in the '80s a fabric, wool crepe, like a flannel but it had more texture to it. So if you did that with a stretch in a sweatpant and then a cashmere hoodie, and a knit shirt — which feels like t-shirt, just in the shape of a shirt — that would have all the comfort, it would have all the texture and the color I have a thing in the book about bandanas, kind of to replace the tie.
So I think there's definitely ways of doing all the things that we used to do, to have all the beauty that we used to have, in this new silhouette with these new fabrications — just now, I think the market has to catch up to that. Maybe the pandemic got ahead of them. All the pants I buy now have some kind of stretch, whether they're stretch pants or it's wool with a bit of stretch, I want that.
And so now hopefully the mills are starting to see, ok, they still want beautiful flannels and things like that, but we've got to give it a little bit of stretch, or do the waistband in a way that's more comfortable and has more stretch.
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