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fashion photography

Manou: Photographing India’s Street Style Before Instagram

Manou’s Wearabout began in 2010, documenting everyday style across Indian cities and smaller towns through spontaneous, consistent portraits.

By ThatPainter Team 4 min read
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Manou began photographing street style in Dharamsala in 2009 and started his blog, Wearabout, in February 2010. His work looked beyond fashion-week crowds to how people dressed in everyday life across Indian cities and smaller towns. That chronology places him early in India’s street-style blogging scene, though it does not establish that he was the first or measure when an “Instagram craze” began.

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Who is Manou, and when did Wearabout begin?

Manou is an Indian photographer whose street-style project documented people and clothing in a range of places and social settings. In a 2011 interview, he recalled taking photographs in Dharamsala in August or September 2009, when he was volunteering and had free weekends. He said he began blogging in February 2010 after a traveler friend introduced him to Shoichi Aoki’s FRUiTS and another friend pointed him toward international street-style blogs. Vogue India later summarized his beginnings as taking photos while studying fashion at NIFT and starting Wearabout in 2010.

Scroll’s 2017 profile described Manou as among India’s earliest street-style bloggers, placing his work’s beginnings in 2009. That is the publication’s characterization, not a quantified ranking of everyone working in the field. The dates support calling Wearabout an early Indian street-style blog; they do not show that Manou was literally the first.

What did Manou photograph on India’s streets?

Manou’s project treated clothing as part of everyday life rather than limiting street style to fashion weeks or major fashion districts. In his 2011 account, he named places including Dharamsala, Shillong, Pushkar, Mumbai, Jodhpur, Delhi and Chandigarh. He said he was struck by how practical clothing worn by people with limited means could share visual qualities with trends elsewhere, and by what he saw as a connection between the style of poor people and that of the chicest people.

That attention to different settings made the work broader than a record of runway-adjacent outfits. Scroll’s reading of the photographs emphasizes urban, rural and niche subjects, and a recurring portrait format that gives people rather than elaborate styling the visual focus.

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How did Manou make the portraits?

Scroll describes Manou’s photographs as portraits made at a similar size and distance, with restrained styling. The consistency lends the images a recognizable visual language while keeping attention on each subject. Manou described his Wearabout process to Vogue India in 2022 as “Spontaneous and ordinary.” He said he worked with what was available rather than controlling every aspect of a photograph, and preferred behind-the-scenes images to polished final ones.

In a 2011 interview, he described street photography as appealing because it was unexpected and inconsistent, and because it brought him into contact with many kinds of people. His stated aim was to document style without imposing class-based dictates or stereotypes. The result, as these accounts describe it, was less a staged fashion editorial than an encounter shaped by the person, clothes and place in front of the camera.

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What were the challenges of photographing people in public?

Manou’s accounts do not support the claim that he always asked permission before taking a photograph. In 2011, he said he sometimes asked and also took many unsolicited photographs; some people refused, particularly on roads. He recalled being detained by police after photographing near an Aurangabad High Court and being made to delete images. He also described being followed by men who wanted money or his camera. He said that when working alone in unfamiliar towns, he learned to answer questions politely and be friendly. These are his recollections of particular encounters, not a general statement about Indian law or what every photographer experiences.

He also discussed how image-making could intersect with money. In Scroll’s 2017 profile, he said that at Pushkar’s camel fair some local people knew photographers sold their pictures on postcards and consequently asked to be paid for photographs. He considered payment reasonable, while noting that some people deliberately positioned themselves to be photographed. His observations concern that setting; they should not be generalized to all residents, subjects or photographers.

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How did Wearabout lead to other photography work?

One notable project beyond the blog was Bhane’s spring/summer 2013 campaign. Vogue India reported that the label used 150 people from Mumbai and Delhi instead of conventional models; participants brought their own accessories and selected clothes from the label. Manou was the photographer. Bhane’s retrospective also describes the shoot as involving 150 people and credits him with helping create a visual dialogue around authenticity and community. The figure refers to that campaign, not to the reach of Wearabout or the size of India’s street-style scene.

In a 2022 Vogue India interview, Manou said his work had appeared in The New Yorker, the Museum at FIT, the V&A, The Guardian and Zeit Magazin, and that he had received commissions from Burberry, the V&A, Wallpaper*, Vogue and GQ India. The interview appeared alongside a Samsung Galaxy S22 campaign; that context is distinct from his reported editorial and brand work and does not show that a particular phone was necessary to make the photographs.

What influenced Manou’s idea for Wearabout?

Manou said seeing photocopies of Shoichi Aoki’s FRUiTS helped him imagine a street-fashion project in India. Aoki’s work provided a reference point, but Wearabout was Manou’s own project, shaped by the places he traveled and the everyday clothing he encountered. Fresh Fruits, a photography book by Aoki, is a related reference rather than a book by Manou.

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