Paris Fashion Week: Issey Miyake Street Style

I have been using the new Olympus PEN camera during London and Paris fashion week- perfect in size/ weight whilst producing all important great quality images. I wasn't focusing on street style per-se during London, more details of the catwalk, however have been partaking in a little peeping tom-esque (no real essence of peeping though as there tends to be a sea of photographers outside every major venue) whilst in Paris.

Theres something quite exhilirating about photographing individuals within a crowd slightly off guard, more often than not in a rush- you never quite know who you're going to see or what you're going to get. I do like posed street style but often find non posed images ironically more engaging; devoid of 'auto pilot poses' with an essence of realism.

I also find the style of guests interesting to observe based on the show they're attending. In London, when I attended the KTZ and Nasir Mazhar show, people were dressed with considerably more urban inspired elements (baseball caps, trainers etc) than how one would expect guests to dress to Christian Dior or Lanvin for example. At Issey Miyake there were an awful lot of the popular holographic Issey Miyake bags from a couple of seasons prior.

Anyway, please enjoy a selection of street style highlights from the show. If you've heard of street style photographer Bill Cunningham (documentary on Netflix, anyone?) you may spot him sneaking in to one of my pictures- I had no idea he was there until I was editing on my laptop!

Dark City: Neo-Noir Masterpiece

As I'm sure many of you may already know (I have a tendency of mentioning it...quite a lot) I'm strongly inspired by film. I don't like to limit myself by genre either, as I believe that you can harmonise elements of inspiration from all manner of film, art, music etc. The more you exposure yourself to -even if not typically your 'genre of choice'- the more you mentally gather, ready to use as inspiration when the moment arrives.

If there was ever a film for inspiring neo-noir cinematography this would be incredibly high, if not top of my list. From a visual perspective the lighting is incredibly stylised; a futuristic progression of Renaissance chiaroscuro, and a further development from 30s/40s Film Noir. 

The image above on the left is a film still from 'Dark City' and on the right is an editorial photograph from Numero China by Yin Chao. You can see the similarity of lighting style and strong sense of cinematic emotion, enhanced through this multi-toned/coloured conceptual lighting and cinematography.

I absolutely recommend this film, a perfect example of science fiction neo-noir at its visual best. Bonkers storyline yet also very relative to the concept of 21st century hyper-reality we currently live in, more relevant to the fashion industry than we may think...

Alice Luker
www.aliceluker.co.uk