This article is from a few months ago, but I recently rediscovered it and thought it worth posting!
In short: While Google+ and Facebook make users identify themselves with their "real" names, Twitter and other services don't BECAUSE advertisers don't care what your name is. Advertisers target their messages based on interests, demographics, reputation and influence... and reputation and influence are measured in community response to a user regardless of their name.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Amen! This is so on it!

It’s not that the Beverly Hillbillies can’t sometimes afford the luxuries of Beverly Hills, because they can. Many of them drive brand new cars, wear their Tag Heuer as a status wrist band and have all gone to the Caribbean and dished out the $150 for a 20 minute massage with hot rocks. It’s just that they borrowed 10 times for it. It’s not that the Madison Avenue crowd can’t afford to shop there, because they can. But most of them have borrowed even more to do so. Like Donald Trump, the only ‘billionaire’ who has to do a TV show to earn a living, are we really that rich? Or can we no longer afford ourselves?

OKL creative vp Joshua Liberson | Courtesy: One Kings Lane

One Kings Lane, the flash sale startup specializing in home furnishings, is in the midst of a “pivot,” according to CEO Doug Mack.

The company isn’t abandoning its current business model, he says; instead, it’s investing on the editorial and design side, with a recently opened New York City creative office complementing the engineering team in San Francisco. The vision is to turn One Kings Lane into the destination site for home décor, one that people visit even when they’re not looking to buy a sofa. For example, the startup has been adding more how-to content. At the end of September, it ran a promotion called “Five Rooms in Five Days,” where the site featured decorating tips for a different room each day—with, of course, handy links to purchase the featured goods—leading to its highest sales ever.

A driving force behind the initiative is the company’s vp of creative, Joshua Liberson, who joined last year after One Kings Lane acquired his design firm Helicopter. Liberson was responsible for the look of publications like Condé Nast’s defunct lifestyle magazine Domino, and he said he’s using a magazine sensibility to offer “context” to One Kings Lane’s sales.

And OKL isn’t the only shopping site seeking context. Competitor Gilt Groupe just hired Tom Delavan, another Domino alum, as its editorial director.

The way forward: Content + Commerce

My takeaway...

Lessons from the Great Mickey Drexler, CEO of J. Crew: avoid bullshit, be clear on what you stand for (and WHERE you stand), and don't cave in when your instinct tells you otherwise.

In business: it's best to take a long-term view of building a business, and make investments without having to explain everything - often an impossible notion in a public company. In this economy, everyone is taking business from one another, so "let the best business win."

Drexler is my capitalist hero, indeed!

Without the Apple co-founder, would it have occurred to anyone that technology could be an aspirational accessory?

... just as Jobs made consumers see technology differently – as a friendly, fun thing to interact with that could also look nice while sitting out on public view, hence identifying its owner as a hip individual who cared about style – he made the fashion world see it differently: not just in terms of desirability but in terms of how it could be used to fashion’s own ends. He made them understand that they had something to bring to the table, because he used their language.

Jobs effectively co-opted the rules of fashion and applied them to product design, insisting on clean lines and tactile attraction for his offerings, and updating them with a seasonal slant, not to mention a trend-driven vernacular – the next generation of whatever was always sold as being thinner, sleeker, brighter; the newest model, the prettiest computer in the room – thus allowing fashion to look at what he was doing and co-opt it in return. If he could use a style stratagem to transform technology, why couldn’t style use technology to extend its own influence on the world?

In this way Jobs’ famed “reality distortion field” distorted not just Apple but fashion’s relationship with all technology. It’s hard to think of a style brand now that doesn’t include phone/ tablet/computer cases as a core part of its accessories collections, along with keychains, wallets and handbags. You dress up your technology the way you dress up yourself, depending on emotion and what you are doing every day. A new iPad holder or phone case is a holiday gift item, just like a new pair of shoes or a nice woolly scarf. That transformation didn’t happen because consumers suddenly woke up and demanded it but because fashion realised it could make them want it.

Follow this to its natural conclusion and it’s possible to posit such realisation as the first step down the slippery slope that has led to so many other fashion collaborations and brand extensions: this understanding, which began small but has grown exponentially larger, that style has a part to play in every industry. Hotels, restaurants, condominiums, yachts – fashion is now claiming part ownership of all, eroding the boundaries between disciplines. Like Joshua at the battle of Jericho, Jobs loosed the first brick and the walls came a-tumblin’ down.

vanessa.friedman@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/friedman

By Eric Wilson

Published September 25, 2011

In Esquire’s September issue, David Granger, the magazine’s editor in chief, invites readers to check out Cladmen.com, a site starting in October that will sell items like a $228 pair of chukka boots from Cole Haan or a $795 suit from Michael Kors, specifically selected by the magazine.

And fashionistas who are following the latest runway collections being shown this month have the opportunity, beginning this season, to buy some of those looks, from designers like Diane von Furstenberg, Marc Jacobs and Derek Lam, right from the Web site of Vogue magazine.

A floral printed romper from Ms. Von Furstenberg’s show can be ordered for $498. A leather coat from Mr. Jacobs costs $5,900. And as the site notes, “Vogue may receive a commission on some sales made through this service.”

Fashion magazines are suddenly getting into the retailing business.

While the glossies have long had a reputation for accommodating the designers they cover, sometimes guaranteeing coverage to those who advertise in their pages, a wave of new ventures and partnerships suggests they are willing to go even further by selling the designers’ clothes.

It is a move that is raising some eyebrows in the industry, as magazines like Vogue, GQ and Esquire, struggling to survive in an online world, could potentially become competitors to stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Barneys New York.

“There are no boundaries anymore,” said Howard Socol, the former chief executive of Barneys and now a consultant. Traditional brick-and-mortar stores that once looked at magazines as a way to sell to affluent customers could now look at them as threats.

“There’s competition for everything,” Mr. Socol said. “But it is kind of interesting if you are a store, because you’re advertising in a magazine that is competing with you.”

As the glossies have always credited the samples featured in their editorial spreads, and listed retailers in their "Where to Buy" sections, it only seems fitting that they would benefit from a commission. The logic of this business model has been amplified in recent years with the proliferation of technologies that enable websites to understand where their traffic is coming from, as well as technologies that enable consumers to scan samples from the pages of a magazine with smartphone apps such as RedLaser - all parts have fallen into place to capitalize on the built-in audience of trusting magazine readers, and to follow their actions from the pages of a magazine to an e-commerce site where the transactions occur.

Further, I believe that Eric Wilson makes an excellent point in highlighting the fact that retailers - AND brands, I might add - have been in the content-producing game for years. Whether through the Barneys catalogs or LVMH's www.nowness.com, there is media competition coming from all sides for the simple fact that brands and retailers need to control their brand message.

In the end, I believe that a unique form of affiliate marketing for fashion publications will be more a complimentor than a competitor to brick-and-mortar department stores. They can help the department stores understand what is selling before going to market, and can take on the riskier items and still maintain a reputation as being a beacon for fashion trends.

The only real risk I see here is one that has not yet been addressed, and that has nothing to do with competition, although it may eventually affect advertisers within the magazines. Fashion magazines and their online counterparts, like Vogue and Style.com, exist to thrill readers with the hottest looks in fashion, and also to deliver styled looks mixed from a range of samples provided by their advertisers. This serves to educate the audience on trends, and drives them to buy from advertisers, including retailers. I believe the focus on monetizing fashion recommendations may lead magazines like Vogue to dilute the high-fashion message and push items with a lower price tag or greater mass-appeal in order to drive up revenue. And THAT is where the message of high-fashion pioneering would be lost and the beacon extinguished, thus destroying a powerful tool of high-fashion marketing for brands and retailers alike.

By Kayla Hutzler

---

September 23, 2011

 

Bergdorf's shoppable 5F video

 

Department store Bergdorf Goodman is using a shoppable video to increase the hype surrounding its younger 5F collection to likely increase ecommerce sales.

Bergdorf released a video earlier this week featuring the winners of its previous 5F social media contest wearing a slew of top-name designers. The video is entirely interactive, letting consumers scroll over to view the label behind each product as well as click-to-buy or share the product with friends.

“Bergdorf Goodman did a great job of highlighting numerous products, people and places in the video,” said Abe McCallum, founder/CEO of Clikthrough, San Francisco, CA.

The homepage for Shop My Label.

Photo By Courtesy Photo

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Welcome to “peer-to-peer social commerce.”

“It’s a new paradigm,” said Dearrick Knupp, chief executive officer of Shop My Label, a Web site launching today enabling individuals to become merchants online by building their own fashion boutiques and making a commission off the sales without requiring them to have a Web site, to possess any technical expertise, to purchase inventory or even to pay a start-up fee.

Under the Shop My Label business model, anybody over age 14 can create an online fashion boutique that’s curated from an assemblage of brands and retailers organized by Shop My Label. The boutique would be named by the person running it and viral marketed via social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and their own blogs.

The Shop My Label model brings an exciting premise to the notion of affiliate marketing... from home. While this may pose as a competitive challenge to some retailers, the goal is that they will learn from how the shoppers are merchandising, and will pay out their commissions from the marketing budget. Seems like a good deal all-around!

My real question yet-to-be-answered is how the major luxury brands will respond to the initiative. Tradition dictates that the Gucci's of the world will withhold a presence on sites like this for fear of losing control over their message, carried through the other labels and products they are paired with. Will the Marketing Managers from Louis Vuitton welcome a look combining their wares with those from Delia's?

By Antonella Ciancio

MILAN (Reuters) - Fashion bloggers will help propel online sales of designer clothes, jewels and luxury cars to more than 11 billion euros ($15 billion) in 2015, a research report said on Thursday.

The exclusive fashion world has embraced the Internet later than other industries but is catching up quickly.

Brands such as Burberry, Tiffany and Gucci are increasing exposure to social media to connect with a new generation born when mobiles and Internet were already there.

Online sales of luxury goods still only account for 2.6 percent of a market worth 172 billion euros, but are growing at a rate of 20 percent a year, Italy luxury foundation Altagamma said in its "Digital Luxury Experience" report.

Blogs and social media are setting trends more than fashion critics, with one out of two customers turning to Facebook or Twitter for advice before buying, the study said.

"Fashion bloggers are more and more powerful, especially in emerging markets like China," Altagamma's research head Francesco Di Lauro said.

Fast-growing China is expected to overtake the United States as the world's No.1 online retail market by 2015, according to the research.

Luxury spending on the web also increases in times of austerity, as wealthy customers prefer to buy from the intimacy of their homes rather than in lavish stores.

"Luxury will become less ostentatious, with the average buyer being Chinese, digital and rich," Di Lauro said.

(Reporting by Antonella Ciancio; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)

Thanks to social media, everyone can have a voice, everyone can take part in the conversation, everyone can pass along information and spread opinions. That can be a problem if, like luxury brands, your whole mojo is based on being somewhat aloof. 

Luxury brands are a little like old-school movie stars. They're beautiful, unattainable and a bit indifferent. They carefully cultivate their images as being for a select group who want exquisitely designed and impeccably made things and can afford the jaw-dropping price tags that such luxuries command. This puts luxury brands in a tough spot when it comes to succeeding in the digital age. Most industries have been pushed online in one way or another; most companies and brands have gone online to engage with their customers. But what good would Twitter accounts for Chanel or Balenciaga do? Twitter is used by hundreds of millions of people; a $3,995 Chloé python tote, on the other hand, is not.

Luxury brands don’t want overexposure; they want the right exposure, which is a hard thing to accomplish on the leveled playing field that is social media. Look at what social media and blogs have done to celebrities. We know so much about celebrities, both because they share their thoughts and personal pictures on their Twitter accounts, and because gossip blogs post all of their intimate details and embarrassing, no makeup, sloppy sweatpants, “celebs are just like us!” photos, which then get spread all over the Web through social sharing. There are mercifully some, like George Clooney, who don't play along with this.

Fashion is caught in a bind. On the one hand, it's about being aware of the times and defining new aesthetic tastes accordingly. And obviously for our times, that means incorporating some kind of digital into the mix. It seems the key for luxury brands is finding the appropriate digital contexts for carefully designed and curated branded content, and many brands are doing just that. For example Chanel put on a fashion show in ritzy Saint-Tropez last year and streamed online only on a French social media fashion site Ykone. That all sounds in keeping with Mlle. Coco’s luxe brand.

No luxury brand wants to be the next Charlie Sheen or Linsay Lohan, or Justin Bieber. If they play their well-designed digital cards right, they won’t be.

The take-away: Luxury brands don't want overexposure; they want the RIGHT exposure, both online and off.

A bag by Paula Cademartori.

PAULA CADEMARTORI

The Backstory: A native of Porto Alegre, Brazil, Paula Cademartori might be considered as having a glamorous grind. Her considerable résumé includes a degree in Industrial Design from the Universidade Luterana do Brasil, a master’s degree in Fashion Accessories from Milan’s Istituto Marangoni and a “Young Fashion Manager” certificate from the city’s prestigious Bocconi University. But Cadematori moved beyond the books, and before deciding to go solo, she worked as a junior fashion designer at Gianni Versace, where she focused on the accessories and leather goods collections for its ready-to-wear and couture lines.

After designing a shoe collection for spring 2010, Vogue Italia included her in the Vogue Talents project for upcoming designers, and she launched her namesake bag line in September 2010.

“The bag is first of all an object of desire destined to last in time, season after season,” said the designer, whose pieces combine high-quality materials like supersoft napa leather, python and crocodile, with artisanal details, timeless shapes and contemporary functionality.

The bags are all embellished with Cademartori’s signature: a jewelry-inspired matte metallic buckle.

Sold in stores such as 10 Corso Como in Milan, Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong and Luisa Via Roma in Florence, the line includes one of the brand’s key looks, the Tatiana — a rectangular style that can be worn as either a clutch or a shoulder bag, thanks to the detachable strap.

Paula is a dear friend of mine from Milan, and I love seeing her meteoric rise as a bag designer! Check out her collection - it's impressive, to say the least. This is not a woman to overlook the details!

This article presents the perceived challenges of luxury brands' digital evolutions, and illustrates the opinions and prejudices I faced from luxury brand managers in Italy when approached about online development.
The opinion as I understood it was that the Web was like a huge shopping mall, and as a luxury brand, you didn't want to be in the same mall as K-Mart, but rather with other luxury brands. Now we see digital luxury done well and digital luxury done rather poorly.
As with any brand communications, digital strategy for luxury must always stay on-brand in tone of voice, art direction, image and identity, content, and production quality. When a luxury brand complains of not being able to control their message online, 9 times out of 10 it's because they aren't following the basic laws of good brand strategy.

PHOTO OP: Hermès will showcase the craftsmen behind its Kelly bags and silk scarves with an exhibition of photographs at the gallery located in its Madison Avenue flagship in New York City. The 33 images are culled from “La Maison,” an 11-volume compendium of behind-the-scenes photographs by Koto Bolofo, taken over seven years and published by Steidl in July. Hermès has dubbed 2011 the Year of the Contemporary Artisan and the exhibition, scheduled to run Sept. 14 to 30, is one of a series of events putting the spotlight on its in-house skills.

After a year of fending off a potential hostile takeover from LVMH, it makes sense for the luxury brand Hermés to direct consumer focus onto their artisan techniques to demonstrate the uniqueness of the brand's traditions in craftsmanship. However, as Louis Vuitton and Gucci just ran similar campaigns, they may be a bit late in getting the point across in any profound way.

The only normal in the U.S. is this: American wealth depends more than ever on the stock market. And so does their spending. As the markets become more volatile, so will luxury spending. Even if the wealthy still have money, their August wealth loss and the flashbacks to 2008 will surely dampen their desire for $860 shoes.

This seems obvious – but somehow it’s missed by so many of the commentators and luxury-promoters.

Luxury (at least in the U.S.) is no longer a stable industry. It is increasingly becoming the most manic segment of our consumer economy, as it follows the hyper swings of the stock market rather broader economic growth. The new normal for luxury means there is no more normal. As financial markets, wealth and luxury spending become more intimately linked, luxury will be prone to more sudden spikes and crashes.

At least investors in luxury stocks seem to be getting the message.

I hear mixed reports from global merchandisers on the predictions of luxury consumer purchasing patterns in the near future. As I was just told that buying was up for US luxury retailers this coming season, this article presents an interesting contradiction.

Image via CrunchBase

It was reported earlier this week that for a second month in a row Facebook is losing users in the U.S., Britain and Canada.  The news has investors, advertisers and media companies all scratching their heads simply because it’s so unusual. We’ve all been following the meteoric rise of Facebook for just over seven years now, and the thought of it slowing down is a very difficult idea to digest.

A closer look at Facebook’s global usage shows that it’s actually still growing quite quickly in other countries (Mexico and Brazil continue to add a few million new users per month); and the fact that it has yet to enter China, the country with the largest population of all, should be an indication that it ise nowhere near the end of its reign.  It is very likely that sometime shortly after its rumored hundred billion dollar IPO in the first quarter of next year it will find its billionth user.

That said, there is one simple rule that we all need to remember as Facebook navigates beyond the plateau in growth in the U.S.: Kids don’t want to be friends with their parents.  It’s a sad thought certainly, and it looks worse in print than in reality.  Many kids have great, honest, trusting relationships with their parents.  But when it comes to your personal social graph, at some point during the teen years you realize that you need your space—and Facebook is taking that space away from American kids by serving up access to their thoughts, comments, photos and friends . . . to their parents.

Early adoption of free technology is almost always driven by young people.  Whether it’s peer-to-peer file sharing, text-messaging, instant-messaging or even Tweeting, the young grasp these technologies more quickly and more willingly than adults do.  And that technology gap between kids and parents is a big reason for the rapid adoption.  Teenagers and young adults love it when they find a new way to communicate that their parents don’t get and don’t want.  Hence the myriad translators online that help parents better understand what their kids are typing into their mobile phones.

When Facebook came along, it was exclusive to Harvard.  Then it opened up and became exclusive to all college students.  Then they opened it up again and became exclusive to anyone with a “.edu” e-mail address, including high school students.  So the early adopters of Facebook, those who defined its appeal and built its first and enormous wave of word-of-mouth marketing, weren’t friends with their parents.

But in 2011 all of that has changed.  The average age of a new Facebook user is approaching 40 years old.  The two fastest growing groups of Facebook users are adults ages 55 to 64 and 65-plus.  For a teenager trying to establish his or her identity and some level of personal independence and some level of privacy, Facebook simply doesn’t deliver on its original promise of exclusivity in today’s day and age.

In addition, the problem of there being more than 7.5 million underage Facebook users has caused parents to become more focused on evolving into active, engaged Facebook experts—continuing to drive the earliest adopters away from the seven-year-old geriatric social network that Facebook has become.

A study last year byRoiworld showed that nearly one in five teens surveyed said that they have an account but either no longer visit Facebook at all or are using Facebook significantly less.  It also indicated that the main reason many teens haven’t left Facebook altogether is the ability to play social games—not the ability to connect with friends.

Facebook is in a very difficult position at this point in the United States.  There are certainly ways it could evolve its product to try to minimize the migration of its younger users to new platforms. But most of those ways would alienate what has become the largest (and most valuable to advertisers) segment of its audience: parents.  Through content relationships, games, applications and access to brands, Facebook will have a lot to offer audiences of all ages for a long time. So don’t expect it to close its doors completely for decades to come.

Still, there are too many chaperones at this party, and we should all be on the lookout for the next free platform that connects young people to young people and that your mom is afraid to try.

 

The evolution of Facebook and the ongoing lessons of virtual privacy vs. sharing.

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals. The 21 posits that age as a fulcrum, tenuously balancing the teenage idea of maturity grounded in the uninhibited freedom of self-presentation against the presumptive regrets of everyone older, who must continually be reminded of when it all began to go wrong for them, the day they turned 22.

Forever 21 began in 1984 as a single store called Fashion 21 in Los Angeles. After expanding locally, it spread to malls beginning in 1989, but it has only truly proliferated in the last decade. It now has 477 stores in fifteen countries, and projected revenue of more than $2.3 billion in 2010. The worldwide success of Forever 21 and the other even more prominent fast-fashion outlets, like H&M (2,200 stores in thirty-eight countries), Uniqlo (760 stores in six countries), and Zara (more than 4,900 stores in seventy-seven countries) epitomize how the protocols of new capitalism—flexibility, globalization, technology-enabled logistical micromanaging, consumer co-creation—have reshaped the retail world and with it the material culture of consumer societies.

Though retailers have long employed trend spotters to try to capitalize on bottom-up innovation, fast-fashion companies have organized their business models around the principle, relying on logistics and data capture to respond rapidly to consumer behavior. With small-batch production runs and a global labor market to exploit, fast fashion accelerates the half-life of trends and ruthlessly turns over inventory, pushing the pace of fashion to a forced march. Fast fashion’s accelerated rate—and its unscrupulousness about copying branded designs—means that luxury houses and name designers, which once dictated fashion seasonally, now must increasingly adapt to the ramifications of fast fashion’s trial-and-error approach.

Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce.¹ Their labor practices are in the long tradition of textile-worker exploitation, offering paltry piecemeal rates to subcontracted suppliers and overlooking how they treat employees. For instance, before the GATT Multifiber Agreement lapsed in 2005, allowing Forever 21 and other garment-makers to outsource much of their manufacturing to Asia, the company’s domestic labor practices generated lawsuits filed on behalf of workers who alleged sweatshop conditions. In a press release, the Garment Worker Center, a California-based workers’ rights group, noted some of the conditions that prompted the suits: withheld wages, long hours without legally mandated breaks, rat and cockroach infestations, and a lack of bathrooms and access to drinking water. The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer claimed that companies like Forever 21 “create and demand these conditions. They squeeze their suppliers and make it necessary for them to get things done as quickly and cheaply as possible, no matter what the cost to the workers.”

But why would the companies create these conditions? What logic drives the imperative to accelerate, regardless of the toll on workers? The all-purpose excuse for sweatshop practices once was the overriding need to offer bargain prices to Western consumers who have come to regard inexpensive clothes as an entitlement. Fast fashion has added the justification of better responsiveness to consumers’ fickleness. The companies overheat production schedules abroad so that they can constantly provide novelty and variety to customers who have come to expect it, who count on the stores not necessarily to meet their wardrobe needs but to relieve ennui. Shoppers come to witness and partake in the spectacle of pure novelty. On the chaotic retail floor and in the frantic dressing rooms of Forever 21’s stores, amid the disheveled racks and the items abandoned by shoppers distracted by something else, creative destruction ends up being staged as semi-prurient guerrilla theater, in which an endless series of hurried consumer costume changes is the essence of the performance.

As the fast in fast fashion implies, the companies’ comparative advantage lies in speed, not brand recognition, garment durability, or reputable design. They have changed fashion from a garment making to an information business, optimizing their supply chains to implement design tweaks on the fly. Zara “can design, produce, and deliver a new garment and put it on display in its stores worldwide in a mere 15 days,”² and this flow of information is by far the most significant thing the company produces, far more important than any piped pinafore, velveteen blazer or any of its other 40,000 yearly items. The company’s system of constant information monitoring allows it to quickly spot and sate trends and at the same time largely avoid overproduction boondoggles and the need for heavy discounting.

Unlike earlier generations of mass-market retailers, like the Gap’s family of brands (which includes, in ascending order of class cachet, Old Navy, Gap, and Banana Republic), companies like Zara and Forever 21 make no effort to stratify their offerings into class-signifying labels. They also don’t adopt branding strategies to affiliate with particular luxe or ironic lifestyles, à la Urban Outfitters or Abercrombie & Fitch. Instead they flatter consumers in a different way, immersing them in potential trends on a near weekly basis and trusting them to assemble styles in their own images. Clothes reach stores with practically unspoiled semiotic potential, and consumers are invited to be expressive rather than imitative with the goods, to participate more directly in fashion. We become the meaning makers, enchanting ordinary cardigans and anoraks with a symbolic significance that has only a tenuous relationship to the material item. We work in lieu of advertisers to reconfigure trends and remix signifiers, generating new and valuable meanings for goods. The more new clothes come in, the more creative we can be.

Fast-fashion retailers reap the fruits of that creativity by capturing our preferences in successive generations of products and nearly synchronizing to our whims. Thanks to the rich data we generate as we select, reject, and recombine the items fast fashion offers, the companies need not develop their own brands so much as seize upon customers’ ingenuity, distilling their choices into easily replicable trends and rushing the resulting products to market. If fashion functions like a language, then the fast-fashion firms are mainly interested controlling the underlying system and leave the meaning of the “words” to interchangeable designers and individual consumers. As long as customers are willing to speak fast fashion’s language, the companies aren’t particular about the specifics of the vocabulary. They are concerned only with the rate and volume of change.

In some ways, the fast-fashion companies are developing into post-brands—the apotheosis of the democratization of the designer label and the ready-to-wear revolution. Their lasting contribution to consumerism may be that they have excused themselves from the increasingly clamorous public sphere, already teeming with advertising, to make way for the budding personalities of their customers. Fast fashion itself is perhaps best understood as a kind of social medium, a communication channel that the companies attempt to administer in order to extract regular profits.

Facebook and other social-media companies have a similarly parasitic business model. They also appropriate the content and connections we generate as we recreate our identities within their proprietary systems, and then repurpose that data for marketers who hope to sell tokens of that identity back to us. Much as fast-fashion companies are routinely accused of pirating designs, Facebook continually oversteps once sacrosanct norms of privacy, opting users in to data-divulging mechanisms by default and backpedaling only when confronted with public outcry. It offers a space akin to the fast-fashion retailer’s changing room for the ritual staging of the self, inviting users to seize upon “stylistic elements” from wherever they can be grabbed. We become involuntary bricoleurs, scrambling to cobble together an ad hoc identity from whatever memes happen to be relevant at the time.

Like fast fashion, social media have brought with them a profusion of means and ways to reshape and display our identity. Constantly given new tools to share with, always prompted to say something new about ourselves (“What’s on your mind?” Facebook asks thoughtfully), we are pressured to continually devise ingenious solutions to our identity, which suddenly appears to be a particular kind of recurring problem: one that can be solved by replenishing social media’s various channels with fresh content. Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say—as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear. One can easily fall out of fashion with the algorithms Facebook uses to select which content users see out of the plethora of material friends in their network contribute.

Social media teach us to seize potential signifiers of the self from any available source and spend our energy promoting them as attention-worthy. In this way, they actually abet and are abetted by the insidious creep of design ideology—the assumption that we can choose a desktop image to express our inner being or that housework will be less like drudgery with a tasteful dustpan and broom set. By coating consumer culture detritus with an aesthetic veneer, design ideology helps makes the idea of a self anchored in fonts and Uniqlo tolerable. Armed with the auric criteria of design, we can regard goods and ads and memes on websites as a rich source of inspiration (“Hey, these old Newport ‘Alive with pleasure!’ T-shirts are neat, think I’ll riff on that logo for my Facebook profile picture!”), not as an inescapable blight.

In social media, where everyone can employ design ideology, the persistent messages of advertising—that magical self-transformation through purchases is possible, that one’s inner truth can be expressed through the manipulation of well-worked surfaces—become practical rather than insulting. Not only do the methods and associative logic of advertising become more concretely useful, but its governing ideology no longer seems conformist but radically individualistic. Social media encourage us to appropriate whatever we want and claim it as our own without feeling derivative or slavishly imitative. On Facebook, if I link to, say, a YouTube video of Bob Dylan singing “I Threw It All Away” on the Johnny Cash Show in 1969, I am saying something particular about myself, not merely consuming the performance. I am declaring that video clip to be essentially equivalent to an update I may have written about a trip to Philadelphia or to pictures of me at a party that someone might have tagged. It is all bricolage for personal identity building.

With social media’s sudden ubiquity, it’s plausible that all other sorts of immersive knowledge by which we might invest our identity with meaning will become subordinate to the practice of clever sign manipulation, to adeptly choosing material and affixing it to one’s persona online. Like fashion in its administered, industrialized form, social media seek a monopoly on the expression of individualism; they hope we will think of ourselves only in terms of the mechanisms they facilitate. Facebook wants to be the place where you feel most yourself, with the most control over how you are regarded. But in return, it wants you to think of yourself only in terms of what you can share on the site. It implements freedom of choice as a mode of control; our identities are “unfinished” but contained by the site, which ensures that more and more of our social energy is invested in self-presentation—selling ourselves like we are consumer goods.

The personal brand, in its concatenation of fame hunger and dismal self-exploitation, is the evolutionary end point of a tendency implicit in fashion since the rise of consumerism. As fashion strayed from its pre-capitalist role of expressing established hierarchies, it helped usher in a reflexive sense of self, set in terms of constantly shifting social meanings. It reconciled people to the idea of an identity not foisted upon us by birth and circumstances, but one for which we must hold ourselves personally responsible. Since then, fashion has been a form of institutionalized insecurity. It yokes us all to the zeitgeist, eradicating the orienting effects of tradition and leaving us all more vulnerable to existential doubt.

Once the nature of our identity can no longer simply be assumed as a function of our inherited place in the world, it becomes imperative to justify our conviction that we are somebody and prove it to the world. Sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky argued in his 1987 study Empire of Fashion that people rise to the challenge presented by the destabilization of the self by embracing fashion more thoroughly. Having “generalized the spirit of curiosity, democratized tastes and the passion for novelty at all levels of existence and in all social ranks,” he argues, “the fashion economy has engendered a social agent in its own image: the fashion person who has no deep attachments, a mobile individual with a fluctuating personality and tastes.”

Lipovetsky’s “fashion person” sounds like an embryonic version of the sort of worker now required by neoliberalist capitalism, in which firms focus chiefly on the short-term, draw on a global workforce, and use technology to automate away manufacturing and clerical positions. Workers cannot expect a stable career with one employer. Instead, as the late-1990s business bestseller Who Moved My Cheese? sought to instruct, middle-class workers (likened unapologetically to mice in a maze) have to accept economic insecurity and respond by becoming even more cooperative with their masters. Neoliberalism demands that more and more of the working population tolerate a lack of job security, evince flexibility, and revise customary ways of doing things. Workers must be comfortable living off short-term projects secured through whatever means necessary—ceaseless networking and bootlicking, ruthless leveraging of friends and family contacts, spinning a series of half-truths on a résumé—and they must be more or less self-motivated to produce, to regard themselves as creative forces, to generate economic value in every aspect of how they live, instrumentalizing it all.

If one side of 1990s management discourse threatened the worker with the fate of becoming a helpless and confused laboratory animal, its optimistic flipside depicted precarity as a kind of liberation, with workers as “free agents” cut loose from burdensome corporate bureaucracy. The personal brand was part of that ideological offensive: in 1997, management guru Tom Peters wrote the definitive treatise on the concept for Fast Company: “The Brand Called You,” which advises, “You’re not a worker . . . You are not defined by your job title and you’re not confined by your job description. Starting today you are a brand”.³ Self-branding is “inescapable,” Peters claims, so he encourages us to ask ourselves, “What have I accomplished that I can unabashedly brag about?” and “What do I do that I am most proud of?” and then promptly put these achievements up for sale, inviting capitalists to exploit them. He admonishes that we must be eternally vigilant about our personal brand strategy: “When you are promoting brand You, everything you do—and everything you choose not to do—communicates the value and character of the brand. Everything from the way you handle phone conversations to the email messages you send to the way you conduct business in a meeting is part of the larger message you’re sending about your brand.”

Assessing Peters’s article in One Market Under God in 2000, Thomas Frank found it almost self-evident that personal branding was a form of coercive self-surveillance that corporations were anxious to induce. He heralded “The Brand Called You” as “a terrifying glimpse of the coming total-corporate state, a sort of Dress for Success rewritten by Chairman Mao.” But with the advent of social media, which frankly invites us to “unabashedly brag” about ourselves and to take pride in even the most mundane of our accomplishments (“I just became mayor of Whole Foods on Foursquare!”) and broadcast them, many of us now take that sort of self-branding behavior for granted and engage in it not with trepidation but with glee. By mobilizing all the qualities of the self as factors of meaning production, Facebook fuses Lipovetsky’s “fashion person” and Peters’s “personal brand,” inextricably intertwining marketing with selfhood, so that having a self becomes an inherently commercial operation. Somehow, while we were optimizing our Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds, building up our LinkedIn contacts and building out Farmville empires, the total-corporate state may have arrived without our really having noticed it.

How did this happen? By seeming to mitigate the problems that neoliberalism creates by shifting economic risk onto workers, social media has been able to colonize the collective consciousness. Facebook, fast fashion, and the like provide new mechanisms of solace, quantifying our connections and influence (and thereby making them more economically useful to us) while enhancing the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more productive, more self-revelatory. Though we may be only one of a thousand friends in everyone else’s networks, that never seems especially important when we’re in the midst of posting new pictures.

In turning to social media for comfort, we’ve become happily dependent on digital devices, as we have come to rely on the accelerated rate of communication and exchange they facilitate. They offer us chances to articulate, evaluate, and augment who we are while archiving our identity-making gestures as a collection we can later fawn over and curate. The archiving makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it makes it more tenuous. Our identity can never be so strong as to render any particular gesture negligible; it is cumulative at the same time that it is totally discontinuous. This has the effect of allowing everything we do to seem either significant or irrelevant, depending on which view suits our needs. The online repository has gradually become the privileged site of the self, the authorized version that redeems the frustration and desperation incipient with the provisionality of work life, that corrects the errors and discourtesies we commit in our confrontations with the physical world.

As this idealized online self becomes more articulated, recommendation engines and tracking databases begin to know better than we do what we want, what we should see, what we are going to do, and what sorts of choices we would like to have presented to us to give us a welcome sense of control over the actual surfeit of possibilities. The automated filters allow us to consume more, faster, which means we are producing more data, securing more opportunities for recognition within the social-media sphere. They can direct us to those niches where we can feel important, where we can dominate the hierarchy. In that realm of quantification, the self can score points by innovating new ways to gain attention and by enhancing the value of various other branded goods (including one’s friends, who in social media have become brands themselves). One is never far from a scoreboard for one’s personality (number of Twitter followers, number of comments on a recent Facebook update, number of reblogs on a Tumblr post, et cetera) and because there are so many, we can cycle through them in search of micro-validation. Who needs ontological security when you can be repeatedly “liked” all day long?

With social media’s rise, self-branding seems inescapable, as the stream of numerical data about our popularity makes it nearly irresistible to calculate our brand equity and devise ways of enhancing it. This becomes the price we pay for that delicious sense of autonomy that the consumerist emphasis on freedom of choice promises. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we like it. When identity serves explicitly as a capital stock to be risked in ventures as opposed to something that exceeds or exists outside the dynamics of the market, we exist only insofar as we see ourselves profiting, we see our brand equity growing (or, alas, shrinking). We don’t exist when we refuse to see how our brand plays in the market-driven world. This, of course, is a triumph for neoliberalism, as it suggests it has succeeded in imposing a fundamentally entrepreneurial subjectivity in its subjects to help rationalize its pitilessness.

Personal branding marks a striking departure from the prevailing norms of even a decade ago, when such bald self-promotion as one typically encounters on Twitter and Facebook would have been in questionable taste, and the idea of explicitly leveraging one’s network of friends in order to maximize one’s notoriety would have seemed preposterously alienating. Widespread ambivalence about the effects of commercial social media on intimacy suggests that the alienation is real, as a surfeit of weak ties suffocates stronger bonds yet stronger bonds seem available only through the online tools that have diminished them. The receptive, supportive community that recognizes you for who you are mingles uncomfortably alongside the host of advertisers that hope to persuade you to be something more, that are eager to hijack the self you share and make it a partner brand to help sell product. Such corporate identity expropriation can drive the quest for new, untainted ways to present oneself—the real me, not co-opted, not sold out, the one pushing trends rather than conforming—though these merely lead to fresh appropriations and perpetuate the cycle. Online, the reciprocity of friendship can start to seem indistinguishable from brand synergies; building trust can seem just another self-aggrandizing solo project in disguise.

We need a sympathetic community within which to realize our individuality. Social media tends to turn that effort to preserve that community into the pursuit of fame. And when we pursue fame, our behavior devolves into the familiar forms of self-commodification. We replace the pleasure of what we do with fantasies about the measurable notoriety we imagine we’ll reap. Social-media companies don’t facilitate community any more than fast-fashion companies elevate style; they cater to the fantasy of being a celebrity, the impossible dream of a mass audience for everyone. With that we either beat a retreat into vicarious fantasy or end up squarely in the realm of the creative class and its fiefdom of cool. To dissolve the creative class into universal creativity, the tyranny of “cool”—fashion as a mass-market business; trend spotting as an entrepreneurial vocation; friendship as a quantitative measure; influence as an end in itself—would have to be abolished, not universalized.

The pressure that sustains self-branding, it turns out, ultimately comes from ourselves, everyone on everyone else. We circulate the meanings, we empty out or alter their meaning, we grant the suddenly measurable attention that makes identity salient. We have more capability to share ourselves, our thoughts and interests and discoveries and memories, than ever before, yet sharing is in danger of becoming nothing more than an alibi that hides how voracious our appetite for novelty has become. It becomes harder for our friends and ourselves to figure out what really matters to us and what stems merely from the need to keep broadcasting the self.

And so we vacillate between anxious self-branding and the self-negating practice of seeking some higher authenticity: we have to watch ourselves become ourselves in order to be ourselves, over and over again. This futile process crystallizes in the irrepressible ideal of youth, the time when all that reflexivity seemed like second nature, was authenticity itself. When we were young, when our self-awareness was innocent and our curiosity was pure, our dreams were unsullied and our lives limitless—the memory of it remains vivid even as our self-scrutiny insensibly becomes anxious and narcissistic over the years, as calculating as youth was guileless. In social media, amid all the high school and college friends reconnecting, and the eager meme adoption and trend tracking, and the reawakening sense that the bands and books and clothes we like are of critical importance to the rest of the world, the great consumer promise of a return to the days of youth is perpetually reborn. Forever 21, indeed.

by Sylvia Poggioli

June 15, 2011

Enlarge Marco Bulgarelli /Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

A Chinese employee works in a textile firm in the Macrolotto area in Prato, the biggest textile district in Europe, in 2005. The town has become home to the largest concentration of Chinese residents in Europe — many of whom are not legal.

This month, NPR is examining the many ways China is expanding its reach in the world — through investments, infrastructure, military power and more. In this installment, a tale of two Chinatowns in very different circumstances — one in Italy and another in Lagos, Nigeria.

For more than a thousand years, the Italian town of Prato in the heart of Tuscany has been a textile center synonymous with top-quality craftsmanship.

Now, it has become home to the largest concentration of Chinese residents in Europe.

They have created a parallel, off-the-books economy, raising fears of a growing Chinese foothold in Europe.

A New Globalized Market

On Via Pistoiese, shops are Chinese — hairdresser, hardware store and supermarket. There are few Italians. It's 2 p.m. and all shops are open — there's no time for siesta in Chinatown.

One sign reads, "The sewing expert." Chinese buyers go there for threads, buttons and zippers and sewing machines. The Chinese owner gives his name only in Italian: Giuseppe.

The Chinese in Prato are wary. Authorities say 20,000 are legal, but as many as 30,000 are not. All together, that makes the Chinese one-quarter of the local population.

Recent police raids uncovered a string of sweatshops, where illegal workers sleep, eat and work. Paid miserable wages, they sit before sewing machines for up to 18 hours in a row, producing a total of 1 million garment items a day.

The Chinese have made Prato the hub of a new globalized market.

Pronto Moda: Fast Fashion

At the Macrolotto industrial park, home of pronto moda — or fast fashion — warehouse after warehouse is filled with racks of low-end, trendy women's garments. There are trucks, vans and cars from all over Europe and the Middle East that have come for the "made in Italy" brand at "made in China" prices.

All business here is done in cash. There are no receipts. A woman leaves a warehouse carrying bags of garments. Her license plate is from Bosnia. Nearby, an Arab man is hurriedly stuffing clothes into his rental car. He says he comes five to eight times a year and sells the goods in Damascus, Syria.

Fabio Muzzi /AFP/Getty Images

Street signs cater to the languages spoken in Prato.

At Julywei and King, hundreds of metal racks are filled with clothes. There are no brand labels, just one tag with the status symbol words "a real product made in Italy," even though all the fabric comes from China.

Alex King, 26, says Prato is ideally located in the center of Europe. This business, he says, needs no advertising. It flourishes thanks to an international grapevine.

"They used to buy in China, but they get easier to buy from here because, first, it's near, and, second, they get [the] color they want. Because in China, they have to get a lot of quantity — here, they take what they like, ready stuff. They don't have to order," he says.

Here, a pair of linen pants goes for 8.5 euros, about $10; a woman's top for 4 euros. Despite such low prices, turnover of some 5,000 small companies is estimated at 2 billion euros a year – thanks to "made in China" fabrics and low-cost illegal workers.

Hardly any of these companies, Italian authorities say, pay taxes — a habit learned from their Italian counterparts.

Growing Resentment

Since the Chinese-owned fast-fashion business does not compete with high-end textile companies, the separate Chinese economy was more or less ignored for years.

Enlarge Sylvia Poggioli/NPR

At the Macrolotto industrial park, home of pronto moda — or fast fashion — warehouse after warehouse is filled with racks of low-end, trendy women's garments.

But while the Chinese flourished, Prato textile companies dropped from 7,000 to 4,000 in just one decade.

As Chinese wealth grew, Italian resentment spread.

At a convention of Prato business leaders at a local hotel, guests include the deputy Chinese consul, Yang Han. He is critical of police raids on Chinese workshops. He calls for a more gradual approach to allow Chinese businessmen to learn Italian laws.

"The Chinese government very closely follows its immigrants abroad, who are an important part of our homeland," he says. "They're hard workers with good intentions. They go abroad to get good work, to earn well, and to better enjoy life."

But no Chinese businessman was invited to discuss Prato's economic future. The overriding Italian fear is that the Chinese will expand and apply their winning methods to other, more sophisticated sectors of the "made in Italy" economy.

How to get a "Made in Italy" brand at "Made in China" prices: say goodbye to traditional artisans.

by Sharon Edelson

Susan Gregg Koger

Photo By George Chinsee

NEW YORK — While her classmates were going to the mall and watching movies, Susan Gregg Koger was locked in her bedroom, sifting through vintage clothing and hatching an online business. She launched it at the ripe old age of 18, turning her dorm rooms at Carnegie Mellon into back room operations that belied the size of the company and experience of its owners. Gregg Koger started Modcloth with her boyfriend, now husband, Eric Koger, who is its co-founder.

“I was shipping products out of my dorm room,” she recalled.

Today, Modcloth boasts more than 700 independent designers as well as one-of-a-kind finds such as a vintage gray wedding dress from the Fifties for $249.99, and a royal blue and black Rothchild coat from the Eighties for $79.99.

Koger and her husband were named the number two entrepreneurs under 30 by Inc. magazine, she added.

Anticipating the rise of social commerce early on, Koger eschewed the traditional retail model that relies on large brick-and-mortar footprints. “These retailers can support markdowns,” Koger said. “I spent a lot of time in malls. I saw the decline of department stores and the rise of specialty retailers. None of them spoke to me. I turned on to vintage.”

Koger noted the rise of the communications marketplace where eBay decentralized fashion on the Web. Then came Web 2.0, which created a “whole new level of transparency for retailers,” she said. “We’ll see a whole new slew of social commerce brands. But rather than being about a category, they’ll be oriented around an existing community.”

The Modcloth co-founder shared ideas for a successful online business. “Don’t treat social networks as another marketing channel,” she said. “You need engaging contests and programs. Name it — every item at Modcloth is named. Be the buyer. Work with designers to get them to pre-produce and drop samples.”

Koger said their customers can be engaged in ways one never would have thought of before. Finally, she said, “The customer is the next trend. We’re able to create brands to specific customer aesthetics.”

Modcloth allows customers to be the buyer, too. A tab on the Web site features a variety of dresses and the message, “It’s your chance to be a trendsetter! Does this dress have the right cut, color, and style? Do you think it should be produced and sold on ModCloth? You’re the best critic, so vote now!” Customers are invited to comment on the style and how they would improve it. “The detail is really cute!” one consumer said of a peach-colored strapless dress for $69. “This color would only look good on someone tan or a darker skin color....Someone pasty like me couldn’t pull it off.”

“Items that go through the tweaking program have a higher sales rate,” Koger said.

I've been watching Modcloth for a long time. I delight in their success, and expect them to continue as a game-changer in social commerce for fashion!

by YM OusleyJune 13, 2011

Last November Google lifted the curtain on Boutiques.com, the result of the search giant’s $100 million acquisition of Like.com, to great fanfare. All of the right fashion bloggers had their own boutiques on the site, as did a number of celebrities who appear as inspirations on those blogs. The New York launch party was attended by an A-list style set including Carey Mulligan and the Olsen twins among others.

Less than 6 months later, traffic to the site dropped off by 94%. In January, Google AdPlanner estimated Boutiques.com had 2.6 million visitors per month; in April, the estimate was 170,000 visitors. Even worse, it seems that no one noticed.

So what went wrong?

We often cover the intersection of fashion and tech, and as far as that goes the acquisition of Like and subsequent launch of Boutiques would seem to be a pretty big story, but we held off on covering it. As big as their acquisitions can be, Google’s track record on non-search products is actually very hit or miss. If you want an example of why talent + a big buyout doesn’t always equal success, look no further than the story of Dodgeball/Foursquare. The same people who built current mobile darling Foursquare sold a similar product called Dodgeball to Google in 2005, and left after about two years because Google didn’t support the project the way they had in mind. The fact that you now check in to Foursquare, and not Dodgeball, should tell you everything you need to know. For every YouTube, Google likely has 2 Dodgeballs; and if their drop in traffic is any indication Boutiques.com is likely going to have more in common with Dodgeball than YouTube.

We can’t offer any inside information on this story (contact us, if you can), but even from the outside looking in there are a few things that seem to smack of neglect and a business that ultimately just doesn’t fit with Google.

Google’s Social Manifesto

When Larry Page took over as CEO of Google, he made the importance of social abundantly clear to Google employees, tying 25% of their bonuses to the success of Google’s social strategy. {Business Insider} Google’s +1 button is the most recent iteration of a strategy that ties search and social together, but in addition to Boutiques not being mentioned in any company communications surrounding social, there’s not a single +1 button on any Boutiques page.

In one of the few critical pieces after last year’s launch, Fashionably Marketing listed a number of the site’s cons from a publisher perspective. “It’s going to be hard to get users to abandon other sites to be a part of the Boutiques.com community.  There are limited social sharing features; you can email or Tweet about a boutique, and that’s it. Facebook was clearly left off because Google may want to compete with Facebook in the brand/customer engagement and sales arena later on,” editor Macala Wright wrote.

For a site built heavily around social features, the fact that no social improvements have taken place since launch is telling. For a comparison, Polyvore has nearly 90,000 Facebook fans – Boutiques.com has less than 750. The fact that they aren’t even tied in to Google’s broader search efforts makes us wonder how much time Boutiques has before it hits the deadpool.

Too Much and Not Enough

Part of the problem may be that Boutiques is still trying to figure out what it wants to be. Is it a celebrity shopping site? Place to follow fashion bloggers? Social community to share products? It’s a little bit of all of those things without being particularly great at one. In a New York Times article that ran when the site launched, that confusion spilled over to potential users.

Yet, after the meeting, both women identified an obvious shortcoming of Boutiques.com: As curated as it is, a lot still comes up in a search. Suggesting that too much information may be a turnoff to inexperienced Web shoppers, Ms. Son said, “It’s going to take some getting used to, that’s for sure.”

Nodding, Ms. Oliver said: “I feel it’s an amazing site, but there are a few aspects that are not very intuitive. Some people might go back to the regular Google search and look for their boots.” {New York Times}

Which might be okay if that’s how user behavior played out, but from all indications, users aren’t going to Google. They’re going to more precisely defined sites like ShopStyle (product search) and Polyvore (curated product layouts and social).  And though Boutiques recently introduced product analytics, which seem to be a better fit with Google’s offerings, Polyvore’s much larger audience is going to offer a much larger amount of data to brands.

Not Measuring Up

The numbers may be off, but Quantcast shows the rise and sharp decline of Boutiques.com

In the same New York Times article, Like.com founder Munjal Shah said “Shopstyle’s done one of the best jobs in my opinion of creating the right high fashion experience, but we think of it as Layer 1. It’s kind of broken things down, but they didn’t go for a detailed categorization and they didn’t personalize.”

When we wrote about ShopStyle’s new mobile content offerings in February, audience data from Google Ad Planner put their January audience at 3.8 million visitors and Boutiques.com at a smaller, but respectable, 2.6 million visitors. Fast forward to data from April and the estimates for ShopStyle are 3.9 million, Boutiques.com is at 170,000.

The dropoff is more than likely the result of marketing arrangements coming to an end. Polyvore and Lookbook.nu were reportedly traffic partners, and lots of A-list style bloggers and celebrities were attached to the project as well. Which was great for a one time push – as indicated by January numbers, but not enough to sustain a site that at its core isn’t offering something markedly better or different than its competitors.

A look at the boutiques of many of the bloggers and celebrities turns up an abundance of items that have long been out of stock, seemingly indicating that few people are updating any more. Jack of all trades, master of none is the phrase that comes to mind. Meanwhile, Like.com has remained focused on a core visual search product and is estimated to have had 630,000 visitors in April.

We push fashion brands to embrace technology, but this is a good reminder that going at the fashion/tech intersection from the other side isn’t any easier. From the outside, it’s difficult to assign responsibility solely to Google or the people behind Boutiques, but everything so far seems to indicate that Google is going out of fashion.

 inShare More: Boutiques.com • Google • Polyvore • ShopStyle

Google's boutiques.com bombs while Polyvore reigns, but what about the latest contender, Svpply? They offer curated boutiques, a great search appropriate for the newbie or the connoisseur, and more social capabilities. I think they are the one to watch!