Yvan Rodic: The man behind the camera

As I am fed up with learning, I devoted my spare time to flip through some fashion magazines. Needless to say, the magazines are bulging with information about Berlin Fashion Week which dictates us the latest trends for this year. But instead of only taking a gander at the catwalks, the cameras pointed at the various street styles as well. Bloggers and fashionistas lined the streets off the beaten track, each competing to catch the best performance. But only few were favored by fortune and got photographed by Yvan Rodic who entered the fashion fray last week, too.  

When French Elle published an article on "How to Become Hip in 15 Steps", there was no doubt about the first step: "Get photographed by Face Hunter". Face Hunter is the alias of Yvan Rodic, a 32-year old Swiss who established himself as one of the best-known street style photographers in the world. He is at the forefront of the current fashion revolution as he travels the globe, snapping the most stylish looks in the streets and discovering fashionable individualists in over 30 countries. Rodic, who is part Scandinavian minimalist, part British dandy, began his career in an advertising agency before founding one of the most innovative fashion blogs on the internet. "I didn’t have any background in photography or fashion,” the photographer said to New York Magazine. “I just moved to Paris and started making friends in fashion, and I thought it would be interesting to share what I see”.

A few months later, GQ Magazine drew attention on the European guy and asked if he was interested in covering New York's Fashion Week. And of course he was. Collecting hundreds of photos, he then initiated his blog facehunter.blogspot.com which generates more than a million hits a month by now and largely influences the fashion scene: Until recently, fashion trends were created by designers, celebrity models and fashion editors from the top down. Now they trickle up from the street to the runway, sometimes bypassing the fashion industry entirely.