Celebrating Style on the City Streets

New York Look Book: A Gallery of Street Fashion" (DK Publishing, $24.95, 256 pages) — a medley of photographs and impromptu interviews conducted by New York magazine staffers — is full of "only in New York" moments. The colorful coffee table book comprises more than 100 white-backdrop snapshots of schoolgirls and socialites, families and freak show performers, hedge fund managers and hairstylists, models, musicians, and stay-at-home mothers. They are united by their stand-out style.

This absorbing book, produced by fashion writer Amy Larocca and photographer Jake Chessum, is a collection of the best portraits from the magazine's three-year-old "Look Book" feature. In addition, some previously unpublished pictures and interviews were included.

A smattering of celebrities is featured in the book. Actress Helen Mirren looks coolly, comfortably chic in a knee-length, gray pleated skirt, a pale pink cardigan, with candy apple red reading glasses strung from her neck. Filmmaker John Waters, photographed wearing turquoise jeans and a navy blazer, describes his look as "disaster at the dry cleaners." And designer Cynthia Rowley, in a little black dress, striped tights, and an oversize, heart-shape belt, admits that she almost always wears her own designs: "It would be too embarrassing to say ‘Louboutin!' ‘Marc Jacobs!'"

How were the subjects chosen? About once a month, the magazine sets up a makeshift studio somewhere in the city. As the authors write in their introduction: "We never tell anyone where or when we're going (though we've been offered all sorts of things — a Porsche, for example — for the information). We wait and we watch for someone to catch our eye."

The book is a tribute to the unrehearsed style and enormous variety that makes New York a fashion capital. More wide-ranging and irreverent than that of Parisians, the New York sense of style gives city natives and transplants their own je ne sais quoi.