On the phone from New York, Scott Schuman (aka street photography blogger extraordinaire, The Sartorialist) is cruising around on his bicycle, camera in-hand and on the lookout for stylish passersby.

This week, his second book, The Sartorialist: Closer, will launch, likely spurring a sudden spike in bookstore stylishness. After that, various Fashion Weeks, with all of their corresponding fetes, fanfare, and flights, will beckon him. Nevertheless, Schuman would rather be out on the street.  “A perfect day to me is just to have a couple of hours to go out, jump on my bike, roll around, and shoot,” he declares.

The king of fashion bloggers, he helped pioneer a new medium as his website became an international style arbiter, a daily dose of escapism for millions, and a Pixies-style inspiration for countless imitators and also-rans. Yet, despite his online pedigree, he cites his personal affinity for books – remember those? – as the major impetus behind Closer.

“You relate to something differently when you hold it,” he says matter-of-factly. “I love to have something I can sit and look at and turn the pages…it comes from all the enjoyment I’ve had from books over the years.”

While The Sartorialist ostensibly focuses on fashion, Schuman’s other passions also come to the fore. Thus, the blog acts as an anthropological analysis, a travelogue, and a historical snapshot. Closer aims to more succinctly crystallize those overlapping concerns.

“There are a lot of different levels,” Schuman proclaims, before name checking influences like George Brassaï, Jacques Henri Lartigue, and Edward Weston, all of whom captured specific zeitgeists, with or without highlighting clothing. “August Sander, I’m sure never thought of his photographs as fashion photographs, but you can’t help but look at them [as such] because we just don’t dress that way anymore.”

With that in mind, Schuman envisions Closer as both a record of the past few years and a useful tool with plenty of longevity. “People talk so much about fashion turning so fast,” he notes, “But it’s not true. Fashion and style have a longer shelf-life than just a couple of months.”

Closer’s diversity supports that assertion. Still, for all of its world-traipsing and disparate looks, it flows together with a marked clarity and coherence and a-temporal flare. “I really love the idea that I can have this guy from Morocco next to this very chic Italian guy and the pictures of the two of them lay nicely next to each other,” Schuman comments.

“It’s about learning how to look at an image and getting caught up in whatever romance you find,” he points out. “That’s the reason the site seems to reach a lot of people who aren’t necessarily that into fashion.”

But of course Schuman himself is deeply enamored with fashion, his posts often focusing on the minutiae of a given outfit, spotlighting subtle details like stitching and workmanship, or making a closer examination of silhouette, texture, or pattern.

While at its core the latest release again collects a range of fetching ensembles, it also charts Schuman’s artistic progression, especially in terms of lighting, framing, and mise en scene. “As this whole idea of street photography became more popular, I had to evolve if I was going to keep doing what I wanted to do,” he admits.

A photographer and storyteller at heart, Schuman observes, “A lot of it is me trying to figure out how to tell a particular story. People want a beautiful image but, more importantly, they want an image that they can relate to. At the end of the day, it’s really about the emotional content.”

The Sartorialist: Closer launches August 28.

Related >> "Life's a Party" - Toronto Style and Scott Schuman

Related >> Larry Rosen: Urban Man