Words by Amanda Chemeche - from our Byline Article 
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The first thing you notice in Concrete Catwalk is not fashion exactly, but commitment: to a color, a coat, a shape, or a way of moving through New York. These outfits came with a worldview. Photographer Tessa Gourin’s book, published by Michael Brewer through Canned planet, the independent Brooklyn press he founded and runs, catches people in the middle of ordinary city life and makes their self-presentation feel briefly monumental.

 

I wouldn’t say that Gourin is photographing “style” in the usual sense. Her subjects are often older, more idiosyncratic than the types favored in contemporary Street Style columns. The interest lies in how personal style hardens over time into something closer to character: a visible record of how someone has learned to occupy the city. Brewer’s sequencing gives the book its engaging structure: the photographs move through color, so that strangers begin to echo one another across the page. Red gives way to pink, then beige, blue, black, animal print.

 

Bill Cunningham once called fashion “the armour to survive the reality of everyday life.” Concrete Catwalk takes that seriously without becoming solemn. The result is a book about clothing as instinct, defense, flirtation, joke, and autobiography — and about the urban landscape as one of the last places where getting dressed can still feel like a public act.