Last Saturday Digitalista E. and I (Digitalista K.) had a little chat with the Facehunter. He was in town for a booksigning, and as we made a habit of interviewing famous bloggers that visit our small country (Susie Bubble, Garance Doré, the Sartorialist…) we couldn’t skip this one either.
The American Bookcentre -where the booksigining took place- attracted a little crowd, so we had to wait a while. Some coffee, icecream and a shoppingspree later we finally had the chance to sit down on the couch with Yvan Rodic.
Being one of the renown streetstyle bloggers means competing with the best, but where Scott Schuman says about himself that he’s shallow and doesn’t look for depth in a photograph (his own words in one of Facehunter’s video’s), Yvan sees his work as ‘social exploration’. He has created his own territory trying to contradict clichés about some places he visits. Like Moscow for instance: ”A lot of people have this image about Russia -and Moscow specifically- that people don’t have style and dress in a trashy way, but if you look a little further you’ll see that there’s a lot of hidden creativity there.”
Roaming around the globe and photographing so much people means he sees a lot of very eccentric and strangely dressed personas pass by, but when we asked him where he encountered the most original people the answer was, surprisingly, London. The place he traded Paris for a little while ago: ”In London people are experimenting with their style, probably because different creative scenes interact with each other. Something that can not quite be said about Paris. Paris is like an old lady that doesn’t progress in her sense of style. She sticks with what she’s used to. And Paris does not have one creative scene, they’re all little islands.”
But his favorite place until now is Iceland. As it seems there are more creatively dressed people on a square meter than you’ll ever find in Amsterdam (imagine that Amsterdam has about 770.000 inhabitants, and the whole of Iceland counts no more than 350.000). Yvan says: ”The Icelandic are very friendly people, with a free mind, a relaxed culture. If I ask someone if I can take a picture, they’ll enthusiasticly agree and take as much time as needed to pose. It’s not something you see that often in other parts of the world, where people are always in a hurry.”
We’ll keep following Yvan’s ‘social exploration’ up close through his video’s and his other blog -under his own name- which is about more than streetstyle, shaped into a scrapbook portraying other interesting things in life, like art and architecture. While having the opportunity to discover all these different continents in the world, we’re very curious what he’ll be coming up to next, in, let’s say, a second book? A film? To end with a quote from his book: ”There are no rules. I love to surprise myself.” Well, keep surprising us Yvan!