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A fine rain falls on Kensington Gardens. Scott Schuman, the original street-style photo-grapher, is lingering by the entrance to the park with his Canon 5D camera, looking for specimens to shoot for his site, The Sartorialist. London is a favourite location, he says, partly because the population is so diverse — his pictures cut across a range of ethnicities, styles and emotions — partly because we’re less hung up than other fashion capitals.

‘The thing that London does more than anywhere else is that it’s-so-bad-it’s-good thing,’ he tells me. ‘In New York, the girls want to be perfectly manicured and de-haired. English girls love to find the most awkward thing and challenge concepts of beauty.’

A diminutive and somewhat shy Midwesterner, Schuman first started photographing stylish people in 2005 and has gone on to pioneer a genre that combines reportage with a fashion editor’s eye and an upstart sensibility. ‘He’s a historian, marking the feelings of this generation one photo at a time,’ said an early subject, Kanye West, back in 2009.

At first Schuman concentrated on people coming in and out of fashion shows. These days, The Sartorialist mostly consists of beautifully lit, barely captioned portraits of interesting-looking people from Bali to Poznan, and gets 14 million page views per month. Its success has allowed Schuman, 47, to work for GQ, Vogue Paris and Vogue Italia, collaborate with brands such as Burberry, Levi’s and Tiffany, exhibit his photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and publish three books — the third of which, The Sartorialist X, marks ten years in the business. When I ask if it’s true that he’s the first fashion blogger to turn over $1m a year, he says: ‘Yay!’ But quickly adds that the neat thing is that he doesn’t have to ‘kiss up to the big brands’ and can fund his own trips. However, he says he’s not in it for the money: ‘My dream is to capture a great catalogue of how we looked over 30 years or so.’

At last, someone catches his eye: a thickset Indian guy wearing a navy pinstripe suit cut off at the elbows, clutching a vintage Louis Vuitton bag. Schuman taps him on the shoulder and ushers him into the light. Click, click, click. The subject seems glacially disinterested. ‘It was his grace, right?’ Schuman explains afterwards. ‘I like the way he had a hairy manly chest but he’d put a little scarf around his neck — it’s an interesting mix of masculine and feminine. Plus, I’d never seen him before.’

A couple of hours prior to this, we talked over coffee in a nearby café. (He has a no-fat cappuccino with an extra shot and sweetener, explaining to the waitress that he has to work until 11pm that night; outside of the fashion weeks, he’ll spend around five hours a day wandering around looking for people to shoot.) Schuman comes from a small town in the same part of Indiana that produced James Dean, Michael Jackson and his old university friend Angela Ahrendts, who was, until recently, the head of Burberry and is now, as senior vice president of Apple retail and online stores, the highest-paid executive in America. He reckons it’s the sort of nowheresville that nurtures fashion escapists.

It was Ahrendts who helped secure Schuman his first ‘real’ job in New York many years ago and also hired him to shoot trench coats for a Burberry campaign. For years, Schuman ran a fashion showroom while his (now ex) wife worked for Banana Republic. While he was always interested in fashion, he says he only picked up a camera for the first time when they had children (Isabel, now 16, and Claudia, 13). ‘There’s something about children’s sincerity, their purity of emotion,’ he says. ‘The best [pictures] are always when they’re crying.’

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However, by 2005, he realised he could transfer the techniques to the characters who floated around the fashion world, who were famous within their own circles but unknown beyond. His early images helped to spread the fame of fashion darlings such as Anna Dello Russo (the eccentric editor-at-large of Vogue Japan) and Giovanna Battaglia (the heart-stoppingly chic model turned editor of L’Uomo Vogue). It was an antidote to the celebrity obsession of the age, which Schuman always found unnatural. ‘You knew these magazine cover stars had been dressed by stylists because you’d see pictures of them walking around and they looked horrible.’

His portraits flattered fashion insiders and helped the fledgling photo-grapher to be accepted into the fold much sooner than fellow bloggers such as Tavi Gevinson or Bryanboy; Schuman and his then girlfriend, the French illustrator and blogger Garance Doré, became an industry power couple. However, The Sartorialist’s appeal also went far beyond the traditional fashion audience. He sees his photos as comprising four elements: the light, the character, the posture and the clothes. ‘I wasn’t trying to report what the person was wearing; I’d try to capture how I felt about what that person was wearing,’ he says. For my money, what Schuman is really good at is simply noticing — the roll of a sleeve, the most enchanting print clashes, or the way a schoolboy subtly subverts his uniform. And in turn his photos make you notice things, too. I’m pretty sure his images of dapper Italians riding around Florence on mopeds helped make the tassel loafer ubiquitous, and I have a hunch his fondness for long bare female legs may have dented global nylon sales. But for many jaded stylistas, the pleasure of both his blog and his Instagram feed lies in the images taken miles away from any fashion centres: an Hasidic Jew who has tipped his hat in a rakish way; a couple of veiled female cyclists in Delhi. He cites the National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry as his main influence but hesitates to call himself a photojournalist. ‘When I take these pictures, I don’t want to know the facts. I want to imagine my own story,’ he says. He keeps his captions minimal (never mentioning anything vulgar such as labels or prices) leaving you wondering: Who is this person? Where are they going? What are they thinking?

He has been dismissive of his fellow bloggers in the past, including Gevinson, who began blogging as a teenager and has since emerged as something of a unique polymath. ‘It wasn’t so much Tavi,’ he hastens to explain. ‘It was more like when blogging first started, there were a few of us trying to make it a legitimate thing, but there was this idea among the mainstream media that blogs were just written by 13-year-old girls, which was frustrating.’

All the same, he is faintly appalled when I say that various fashionistas are suggesting that street style is dead. ‘How could street style be dead?’ he splutters. ‘Sure, it had a huge moment — but people are always going to want to love looking at people. If you find a sincere person to shoot — someone who isn’t prepackaged and calculating about the way they want to look — that will always be interesting.’

Schuman himself has been through some well-publicised changes this year: in January, he and Doré released a mutual statement on their blogs to say that they were splitting up. He says it has been amicable and that they still keep in touch. ‘We’re always each other’s best sounding board. I really value her opinion. I liked her take on what she thought a man should be like. She’d say: “I don’t want to go out with a guy wearing orange pants,” so I stopped wearing orange pants.’

They were very similar in character, but in the end it was the differences that counted: ‘She’s from Corsica. I’m from Midwestern America. Her parents were divorced. My parents are together. It was one of those relationships where 95 per cent of the relationship was great but the five per cent that was wrong was important. But once we’d accepted that, we could still respect each other.’

He is now in a relationship with Jenny Walton, a model and fashion illustrator who he worked with on his book. ‘I don’t want to talk about it that much — I don’t want another public relationship. It takes a lot out of you.’ Still, I sense that he’s more comfortable in his skin. The initial mania has passed and he’s now able to spend a few hours of each day wandering around looking for attractive people to shoot, which isn’t a bad way to spend time. (He’s also started meditating and says it’s helped him to live more in the moment.) Currently, he’s designing a capsule collection of shoes with the Italian label Sutor Mantellassi and planning his next trips. ‘I love the contrast of designing a high-end shoe in Milan and then being in the heat of India a week later shooting a couple of kids on the way to school.’

As for his work, he hopes it will only get more interesting as time passes. He has become obsessed with August Sander, a Weimar-era German photographer whose People of the 20th Century series tried to document every kind of profession in German society: the butcher, the baker, the undertaker. ‘You can’t do it that way any more because no one dresses as specifically to their profession these days,’ he says. Instead, he’s focused on creating his own catalogue of people of the 21st century, when instead of being defined by our profession, we try to define ourselves — taking cues wherever we find them. ‘Now, people are their own brand.’ And if there’s an element of fiction-making and dream-spinning in that, Schuman seems cool with it.‘Nobody can live up to your dream of who they are,’ he says. ‘Nobody. I’d rather have a pretty dream than really know the truth.’

The Sartorialist X is out now (Penguin, £19.99)