Street Style from Seoul to Shanghai: James Bent on His New Book, Asian Street Fashion
It’s just past noon in early spring Seoul, the sun’s rays still weak with winter pallor. On the block stands So Young Kang, a vision of thrown-together school-girl chic, cool as can be in the whitewash: thin tartan scarf, wide-collared puffer, skinny jeans, well-worn Céline luggage tote. He doesn’t speak Korean, but photographer James Bent is there to snap her picture.
“See someone I like, and ask them or somehow communicate to them that I’d like a photograph,” says Bent matter-of-factly of his approach to street-style lensing, the efforts from which are now immortalized in his new book, Asian Street Fashion, which will be published in the U.S. this month by Thames & Hudson. It’s a timely release: The fashion world’s eyes are trained on Tokyo this week, where Dior is unveiling its pre-fall 2015 collection.
The book dispels what many have come to expect of street style from the region: Absent here is Harajuku’s lollipop palette, the outré ensembles with fantastical flourishes that for a time defined Japanese—and by extension, continental—proclivities. “The most shocking outfits I see these days are in the West,” says Bent, referring to the feeding-frenzy of look-at-me dressing around New York, London, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks. “In Asia, I feel like style-conscious people are doing the inverse—a lot of people are responding to well-developed and mature fashion.” Indeed, logo-centric brands have been less popular in places like China of late: Asia’s increasingly discerning customer is, in turn, increasingly looking for refinement and taste over anything ostentatious or spotlight-hogging. Bent’s photographs show hundreds of examples of that search for the antidote to OTT style—just look at Yuiko in Tokyo, with her smart, mottled navy A-line trench, or Weisan Hsu in Taipei, wearing a demure adobe-tan skirt and blue blazer.
“All the cities I visited had a strong, modern fashion presence that I hadn’t entirely anticipated,” says Bent, who admits that his favorite metropolis on the continent is Seoul (“It’s a little underrated.”). Yet, collectively, he feels that there are more people who take fashion seriously in Asia—and not just because of the high population numbers of its countries. “In the West, I could generalize and say there are, of course, fashion sets, but there are also a whole lot of people happy to just wear jeans and trainers. In Asia, it feels like the interest in style is much greater, perhaps because of social pressure—and it moves fast. Sometimes overnight, it feels like the next thing has come along.”
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