It’s the upper crust of street style photography.
Joshua Kamei and his @LadiesofMadisonAve Instagram and TikTok accounts have gone viral documenting New York socialites, their fashions and the fabulous backstories behind them.
“I love glamor and I love this city, so it’s just kind of something I started reporting on,” Kamei, a 39-year-old Hell’s Kitchen resident, told The Post.
A fashion designer by trade, Kamei started the account as a side project in 2020 and it’s snowballed in popularity. The Instagram currently boasts 195k followers, and the TikTok has 122,000 followers.
Kamei’s earnest adoration for his often senior subjects’ old school class and elegance make the account stand out in a sea of digital street photographers and videographers.
In both still images and delightfully chatty videos, he captures the citizens — mostly women “aged 40 to 95” — of upper Manhattan’s tonier corners. Their looks defy easy categorization, but they all exude a certain classy, Upper East Side elegance and expensiveness.
Subjects have included everyone from an anonymous smartly dressed older couple — him in navy blazer, her in a tailored pink frock — at a stoplight, to former Welsh model and onetime Vogue creative director Grace Coddintonn sauntering down Park Avenue in black, to a younger couple at the Metropolitan opera, the woman in her mother’s sleek charcoal skirt.
“I love when I can tell a generational story,” Kamei said.
One of his favorite local fashionistas is a smiling, elderly blonde he most recently photographed wearing a black, Karl Lagerfeld-designed Fendi dress with a boat neckline. He doesn’t know her name but he loves her looks.
“She is one of the gems of Madison Avenue and one of the reasons I wanted to document “’The Ladies of Madison Avenue,’” he explained in the caption.
Despite many of his subjects being in their sunset years, Kamei — who grew up in awe of Audrey Hepburn and his glamazon grandma in Jackson, Mississippi — is a strong believer that age is not a necessary qualifier for being chic.
“I think sometimes it’s a presence,” he said. “Sometimes certain women just have something and you don’t even notice their clothes, and you’re like, my God, who is she?”
He doesn’t strictly limit himself to uptown, but the vast majority of his subjects are indeed snapped above 59th street.
“There’s so many people already reporting downtown,” he said of the oversaturated scene. “So I’m just going to stay in my lane.”
And, while he typically documents older women, his followers are mostly in the 25 to 35 age range.
“I think they see women that they would like to be like when they grow up,” he said.