Celebrating Style on the City Streets
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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 In addition, some previously unpublished pictures and interviews were included.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.