Street style at fashion week: the crowd is the collection

By 10 a.m. outside the Alexander Road venue, the queue for street style photographers was already longer than the queue for seats inside.

This has become the quiet second show of every fashion week: the fifteen or twenty minutes between a guest's car pulling up and the doors opening, where a rotating cast of photographers, several thousand Instagram followers deep, work the pavement for the look that will outlast the runway show itself. This season the standout looks skewed maximalist — head-to-toe Ankara suiting, oversized structured coats worn open over bare shoulders, and a run of statement headpieces that made the gele trend impossible to ignore, even for attendees who weren't wearing one. One look in particular, a floor-length emerald agbada worn by a menswear buyer over beaded sandals, appeared in at least six photographers' feeds within the hour, according to a tally kept by two of the photographers working the venue steps.

"I've shot fashion week street style for six seasons now, and this is the first year the crowd outfits are getting more engagement than half the runway posts," said photographer Thabo Nkosi, who works the entrances for a Johannesburg-based style account with just under 90,000 followers. "People used to dress to be photographed near someone famous. Now they dress like they're the story."

The shift has changed who shows up and when. Several attendees interviewed outside the venue said they had arrived ninety minutes before doors specifically to be photographed in daylight, before the evening crowd — and the harsher flash photography — took over. Brands have noticed too: at least two labels this season sent pieces directly to stylists known for dressing front-row regulars, effectively treating the pavement outside the venue as unpaid runway space. Inside, the show ran forty minutes late. Almost nobody outside seemed to mind.