Refinery 29 has created a brilliantly cheeky flow chart mapping the predominant "sartorial patterns" for those fashionable city-walkers who might hope to be photographed by The Sartorialist's Scott Schuman. (Click through to see the full chart.) It's spot-on, not just in its gently teasing dissection of Schuman's parameters for choosing stylish subjects, but also in its documentation of just those tensions I discuss here between individualization and standardization in the "daily outfit" photograph, which could be replicated I imagine for any given style blog. (The familiar critiques about the narrow strictures for the right "look" that will earn you sartorial love on lookbook.nu, for instance, could easily lend themselves to this exercise.) The chart both names the "uniform" that qualifies a person for a Sartorialist photograph (with all the implicit gender and sexual norms), but also the distinctive "detail" that stands in as a signifier for what we recognize as "a unique personal touch" -- the "quirky hat," the scarf, the "pop of color."
