How I Went From Stay-at-Home Dad to Fashion's Front Row in 10 Months
I started in social media so early that when I told people “I have a blog” they would ask if I needed to see a doctor to cure it.
But, yes, it’s true that I went from being a stay-at-home dad to the front row of fashion week, my own page in GQ magazine, and an ongoing gig with Style.com (now Vogue.com) in about 10 months.
What’s more, in 2005 I was a totally self-taught photographer that, for the first year of The Sartorialist, I had to get any photos I could while my younger daughter was at preschool and before picking up my older daughter from grade school.
By all accounts The Sartorialist was, literally, an overnight success but the reality is much more complex, much more interesting and about 25 years in the making.
Let me give you a little background first. I grew up in the American fashion capital of Indianapolis, Indiana. I grew up playing sports and reading about athletes who kept talking about wanting to look “GQ”! This peeked my curiosity and I ended up buying my first GQ magazine in December 1982 while I was in 8th grade.
In October 1983 GQ created a special edition on Italian Style that helped set my eye for the rest of my life. I didn’t understand that what I was seeing in the magazine wasn’t quite reality but it sure looked a lot better than the reality I was seeing at Washington Square Mall on the Eastside of Indianapolis! I remember looking at those pages and thinking “those people look like they’re having a lot more fun than me or anyone around here”. I quickly gave up sports and became totally obsessive about the world of fashion (both mens and women’s) and trying to figure out if there was any place more me in that world.
I spent my college years studying costume design, tailoring, pattern making and couture sewing techniques like the “European Turn” but there wasn’t an actual fashion design course offered at Indiana University. Don’t ask me why I didn’t go to NYC to study fashion but to me New York seemed as far away as Mars. I hadn’t even been to Chicago at that point in my life. However I realized pretty quickly my calling wasn’t going to be in fashion design but probably in some related area like sales and marketing. During college I spent my free time pouring over American Vogue, Italian Vogue, GQ, Interview, and Details magazine and any other cool magazine I could find at the local bookshop. Even though I never studied photography I’m convinced this innocent time spent looking at those magazines taught me subconsciously what it takes to make a compelling image. The entire world came to me through those images and instead of studying composition, aperture and shutter speed I was, unknowingly, learning how a photo should make you feel, make you dream and make you curious.
When I arrived in New York I was trained for design but I had no confidence in my creativity. I always imagined everyone in New York was going to be soooo much smarter and cooler than me and for the first few years they were. I did various showroom sales jobs and finally landed at Onward Kashiyama where I sold a Michael Kors designed secondary label called ICB but the other showrooms in the office were handling Helmut Lang (he was probably the most important designer in the world at that moment) and JPG, so I felt like I was getting close to being “in the game”. I then moved to Valentino at GFT which wasn’t a hot brand at that moment but still a great experience and a step closer to Italy.
In 1999 I bet on myself and opened my own showroom specializing in sales and promotion of young American fashion designers. Everything went great, almost all my designers were showing during NYFW and I felt like I was finally finding my way in the business. However no one could have predicted 9/11! After that I held on for another year but young designers were closing their businesses so I eventually closed my showroom. As fate would have it, about that time, the nanny for my 2 daughters had left to go back to South America and, until I could figure out what I wanted to do next, I became a stay-at-home dad.
That time in my life was, literally, the best of times and the worst of times! I loved being with my kids and I knew raising your kids could never be a bad thing but I was also completely lost with what to do next in my career. I just couldn’t imagine going back to do sales. I was completely burnout on that and need to feed my neglected creative side. In a fortune coincidence a friend had given me a book about photographing your kids written by the famous fashion photographer Arthur Elgort. I started taking that camera with me to the park with my daughters and studying the book at night. I really wanted to make my photos look more like the photos I saw in Vogue or in the books of Steve McCurry. I still remember very clearly one night after putting my daughters to bed and looking at a book by Steve McCurry and thinking “What a cool job he has! He just gets to walk around the world taking photos of people!” I didn’t realize that I was about to make that my next job!
During that period I really fell in love with photography and the joy of making images. Luckily I now have a lot of great photos of my kids. At that time we lived in Chelsea and the photo district was in the neighborhood next to us. I would go into Fotocare with my daughters and I’d have to act out what equipment I wanted to buy because I didn’t know the technical terms!! At some point the guys at Fotocare started hearing about The Sartorialist and realized I was the guy behind it. They would say to me “Wait, you’re the guy doing The Sartorialist?” And I’d embarrassingly reply “Yes” and they’d say “But how? You don’t know what you’re doing??!!” I was in full blown fake-it-till-you-make-it mode!
Somewhere around the second year of watching my kids I started hearing about blogs and chatboards and after a little research I immediately understood that they were (at that time) very text driven and could use a more visual element especially when talking about something like fashion.
As a total goof started my blog (with a name I made up) called The Sartorialist with the idea of taking photos of people I thought looked cool but, maybe, not necessarily fashionable. I thought it would be cool to mix images of suited guys next to skateboarders next to cool girls and fashion insiders. I really didn’t think it was going to go anywhere but it was a fun creative outlet from dadding.
I started posting sparingly in September 2005 but by April 2006 I received a call from Nick Sullivan (fashion director of Esquire) to supply images for a street style page they wanted to introduce in the magazine. Pretty quickly after that came a call from Style.com to cover the men’s shows in Milan that June. In a matter of weeks I went from being a stay-at-home dad to a professional photographer for two of the most important American fashion publications while also growing my own blog. Knowing that this was my big break I asked a friend to borrow $20K. I spent half on proper camera equipment and the other half on clothes so I’d look like a fashion editor.
Again I’m sure this now all sounds so weird but at that time pit photographers and fashion editors didn’t really mix that much at the shows. However, I knew that if I looked and talked like an editor but was shooting like a real photographer this would help me stand out. Sure enough, on that first trip, Jim Nelson (then the EIC of GQ ) asked before a show “so what exactly are you doing?” And almost as soon as I got back to NYC I had my own The Sartorialist page in GQ magazine, a recurring gig at Style.com and a blog that was absolutely exploding!
The next big hurdle was convincing Style.com I could do women’s fashion week even better than men’s since almost all my professional career was in womenswear. After a very intimidating meeting with Candy Pratts Price (then fashion director of Style.com) I was given a chance to cover the entire September 2006 fashion month and the rest is history.
So that is the “how” the The Sartorialist started but the “why” of it taking off so quickly boils down to one very, very important but undervalued skill…EDITING!
To be honest, at that point, my photography skill was just ok and I didn’t know anyone in the PR or magazine side of the business plus I had been out of the business for about three years so I was a true outsider.
However I’m sure what caught the eye of seasoned fashion editors was my well-developed sense of who to shoot! My mix of tailored guys, “It girls”, skateboarders and fashion insiders was totally new and unique. Actually the only other person shooting street style at that time was Bill Cunningham and his mix was very different, very women’s driven and very uptown.
The fact that I was able to constantly photograph and post strong images and write with a knowledgeable point of view, while doing it all on my own, made it easy for someone like Style.com or GQ to give me a chance.
Luckily with the new camera equipment and a lot of hard work my photography skill caught up to my eye and I knew I was, finally, creating my niche in the fashion world!
If I had to give advice to anyone wanting to make an impact in the fashion world I would tell them to make sure their edit is very, very personal. When I think of the photographers that have made successful street style careers it’s because their edit is so very clear. At fashion week I’m constantly seeing people and thinking “that’s a Kuba shot” or “that’s so Adam” or “a very Phil Oh moment”.
Anyway it’s this very personal edit that I’ll be using to curate this platform! It might not be as many shopping recommendations as other creators or written for the biggest audience but it will be honest and thoughtful and a real reflection of what excites and inspires me about fashion, photography and travel!
You took my photo and posted it to your blog in March 2007 and it still remains one of my defining moments as a New Yorker!
This is so honest and so interesting! Love the part where you say you spent half of your borrowed money on clothes to look like a fashion editor - so smart.