Back in the 80s and 90s, when street style shots were the product of spontaneous, fleeting moments of brilliance and not insouciance-feigning influencers traipsing backwards and forwards outside fashion shows, there was STREET magazine.
Founded by Shoichi Aoki in 1985, the publication gathered together the best candid fashion footage from all four corners of the globe – from the cobbled streets of Paris and the sidewalks of New York City, to Antwerp, Tokyo, Berlin, and beyond.
Though Aoki continues to document cool people wearing clothes in imaginative ways through STREET to this day, past issues from its vast archive are, unsurprisingly, pretty difficult to get your hands on these days.
The good news, then, is that the magazine’s first 100 issues just became available in an entirely digital, downloadable format for the first time ever. Across 3,600 digitised pages(!) fashion fans can chart the evolution of style across two decades, or use them as a source of inspo when it comes to their own look for less than the price of a coffee (seriously: a single issue is $2).
Also available to download are back issues of Aoki’s legendary publication, FRUiTS, which documented the wild style of Harajuku from 1997 to 2017 – by this point, “there were no more fashionable kids to photograph’ he told us in an interview last year.
However, the mag’s founder explained that new life had been breathed into the area’s streets, which he says we have the likes of Demna Gvasalia and Virgil Abloh to thank for. In fact, he’s so inspired by a new gen of stylish kids, he’s thinking about resurrecting FRUiTS in the not-too-distant future (so keep your fingers crossed, okay?).
Until that happens, dip into STREET’s archive in the gallery above, into FRUiTS’ archive in the gallery below, and head here to download your own digital copies of the magazines.
