Rachel Youens
More than a music scene
Austin Style Watch showcases the city’s eclectic street fashion
By Arianna Stern
Published: November 12th, 2007 | 4:22pm
With South by Southwest and scores of indie bands like Voxtrot and Earl Greyhound, Austin has a national reputation for its awesome music scene. But when 24-year-old Rachel Youens decided to start austinstylewatch.com, she was responding to a lack of public consciousness about certain facets of Austin — namely, its fashion sense.
Austinstylewatch.com features a street-style photo blog reminiscent of Fruits (fruits-mg.com) and a written blog with interviews of up-and-coming Austin designers, commentary on fashion shows, and general editorializing on the state of Austin culture. “Fashion isn’t something our city is famous for,” Youens says. “We’ve got the music thing, and we’ve got [music blog] Gorilla vs. Bear and all that, but fashion is not something we’re known for much at all. [I was] trying to just give us a fashion identity in the world.”
Youens was inspired by popular style Web sites including Helsinki’s Hel-Looks and Paris’s the Facehunter. “I’d look at these cool cities and I would feel like Austin was so uncool,” she says. “And then I started to look around me in Austin. I realized just how many really unique people here are, and how many trends and fashion phenomena I was seeing that were very native to the area, and I really wanted to share it.”
As a multimedia journalism student at the University of Texas, Youens formally studied blogging. After graduating in the summer of 2006, she chose the blog format for austinstylewatch.com because of its immediacy and DIY aspect. Though she admits she would love to turn Austin Style Watch into a job, for now she works as a reporter for The Daily Texan. Youens operates Austin Style Watch by herself as something of a hobby, albeit a perk-heavy one — it’s landed her on concert guest lists and earned her the occasional gift certificate. “I just found that amazing, that on a low budget and with my own know-how, I could suddenly have my own publication that people all over the world were reading,” she says, citing that most of Austin Style Watch’s hits come from Spain and France.
Austin Style Watch offers a glimpse of Austin’s quirkiness and eclecticism, which Youens committed to representing through her photographs. “I really wanted it to be somewhere where you could see the whole spectrum of who we are in Austin, from the really nice, Dallas-y influenced, dressy people, to scummy punk kids on Red River, to hipsters, to rockabilly people at the Continental Club,” she says. Every subculture in Austin makes an appearance on Austin Style Watch, spanning a number of ages, races, and attitudes — from aloof, pouting scenesters to cute girls with normal jobs that just happen to own some kick-ass dresses.
Perusing photos on Austin Style Watch feels like hanging out in Austin and bumping into some really well-dressed people. It doesn’t hold its subjects to the same kind of impossible beauty standard mandated by glossy fashion magazines or hipster nightclubs. Youens finds her subjects all over, and she decides whether to shoot an event based on whether she thinks it will accurately represent Austin. She might seek out, for instance, local indie bands whose sense of style could influence how their audience members dress, or partygoers at the Second Sunday Sock Hop, who dance to old-time music in old-time threads. “People dress really awesomely, a lot of cool vintage stuff,” Youens says. “I’ll try to shoot events that are uniquely Austin and where I think people will be intrigued by it, not just touring national bands where you’ll see the same kind of audience members all around the country.”
A number of party photography sites like the Cobrasnake, Last Night’s Party, and Everyone is Famous have risen in popularity from 2004 until now. Because of the young age of the majority of people featured on Austin Style Watch, some detractors charge Youens with shooting too much in the style of party photography, but she quickly differentiates style sites from the party photography ilk. “I don’t try to sexualize people, and I try to keep it a standard style of a head-to-toe shot cause I wanna see what shoes that person’s wearing and what handbag they’re carrying,” Youens says. “And I’m not really trying to tell a story with my picture or glorify an event.”
She adds that Austin Style Watch doesn’t glamorize boozing and drugs the way party photography sites tend to. Beyond that, what sets Austin Style Watch apart is its local focus and anti-elitist bent. “I wanted to be really democratic in the type of fashion showed. I didn’t want it to end up being like a yearbook of hipsters in Austin,” she says.
Youens’ anti-elitist ethic comes from her personal definition of style, which accounts not only for aesthetics, but also for a person’s region and interests. “I call it Austin Style Watch and not Austin Fashion Watch and there’s a reason that I do that,” she says. “It’s because I believe style is something that’s unique to each person, it’s regionally unique, it’s unique to your heritage. Your style is uniquely you. And I think that when you’re copying some style that you see out of NYLON or copying a style you see off the Cobrasnake, that’s just the same as wearing the same thing from Target that’s all over the world. I want somebody to look at my site’s pictures and know that it’s from Austin and not confuse it for somewhere else in the nation. I think that’s really important.”
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THE BEST OF AUSTIN STYLE
AS RECOMMENDED BY RACHEL YOUENS
Dirty Librarian Chains
http://www.dirtylibrarianchains.com/
Factory People
http://www.factorypeople.com/
“It’s really overpriced, but something from Factory People is always cool to do.”
Team Fabrication
http://www.myspace.com/teamfab
Naughty Secretary Club
http://www.naughtysecretaryclub.com/shop/
“Cool, plastic, refashioned jewelry”
Hot Pink Pistol
http://www.hotpinkpistol.com/
“She paints on clothing, and she does, like, gangster rappers and nautical themes.”
Pallenberg
http://www.pallenbergaustin.com/
“It’s like a really picky vintage store. Pallenberg’s just kind of like, in my hood, so it’s my favorite.”
For more Austin-based designers, check out the Austin Style Watch written blog at http://www.austinstylewatch.com/blog.html.
Issue #34
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