Made popular amongst my friends by “No Bones” Julie.. liquid leggings are still hot these days and seemingly impossible to find. I first saw them on Lindsay Lohan prob. in US Weekly (where else?) and knew they’d be big for night life wear. What could be next for leggings? So far we’ve seen zippers, bows, ruching, exotic materials/textures, lace, buttons, reflective…  I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Here’s the few pairs of liquid leggings could find. Ladies, cast your votes on which pair is a must-get. Also, if any of you dare to wear these out, I’m curious to see how you’ve worn them so send me a picture if you have one!

American Apparel RSAC306 Shiny Leggings

Members Only Liquid Leggings at Kitson

Slick Leggings at Nordstrom

Celebrities in their Liquid Leggings

Do you guys remember Polyvore? If you don’t then this might be a good way for you to get acquainted with this high tech fashionista tool. A fellow reader (and friend btw for full disclosure hehe) commented to me after reading my last post about the Look Book album I created, that it would be nice for her to have a look book of her own. She wanted to take some of the looks I had in my album and add and subtract items to her liking. Immediately, I thought about Polyvore and how that really is the solution she needed to make this happen. She could work off of the outfits I create in Polyvore to polyvorize her own looks. And of course she could outfits from scratch.

So I’m curious… what do you all think of Polyvore? Have you tried it? Do you like it? If you are using it, what do you like about it and not like about it?

Here’s where the Luxemix Style Challenge comes in!

Objective: To entice my readers to show off the fashionistas they truly are and at the same time get to know more about how you like tools like Polyvore.

The Big Prize: A $50 Gift Certificate to Shopbop or Forever21 (winner’s choice!)

How to Play: Create a look on polyvore and either add to the comments of this post or email it to me directly. In your response please answer the questions found at the end of this post.

How to Win: After a few weeks or once I’ve gotten enough entries I’m going to choose 3 of my favorite submissions and run a poll here on Luxemix and let crowd pick a winning look.

(I’m new at this guys so no promises this is actually going to work!!)

And just in case you’re wondering, this is not a promotion I’m getting paid to do or asked to do by any 3rd party, such as Polyvore, Shopbop, or Forever21. To be honest I’m just obsessed with web tools and in particular ones that have anything to do with fashion and one of these days I’m going to create one myself .

Questions to Answer for Luxemix Style Challenge

1). What’s the link to your Polyvore Profile?
2). What do
you find works well for you when using Polyvore?
3). What do you not
like about using Polyvore?
4). What functionality needs to be added to make Polyvore work better or more fun to use?
5). Are there any other online tools like Polyvore you’ve used? If so, please list.
6). How do you put your outfits together on an every day basis? e.g. Do
you plan what you’re going to wear the night before? Do you keep track
of outfits you’ve put together and re-wear them another day?
6). Do you enjoy coordinating your own outfits or would you rather have someone else do it?
7). How much time do you spend on fashion-related activities per week
(including shopping, picking outfits, reading magazine/blogs, etc).

Thanks for playing guys! Now get out there and start polyvoring!

Start Polyvore

For those US mag readers (is there anyone not included in this population?) who enjoy the guilty pleasure of dissecting and occasionally trashing celebrities and their outfits.. here’s a blog must-read: Couture Candy’s Celebrity Blog.  I have no idea how long it’s been around actually but I found it recently and was immediately hooked.

The format is simple and the posts are dependably consistent…

The Scoop + Celebrity Fashion Photo + Links on Where to Buy

It’s so obvious that celebrities sell clothes better than any multi million dollar advertising campaign could ever live up to. Why don’t more online fashion retailers pick up on this?

Personally, I find sites like this and Frugal-Fashionista so addicting because I love to see how other girls put their outfits together. Getting dressed for events — even if it’s something as mundane as a work day can be something I look forward to and I can really get into about picking out an outfit. At other times though it can be a very grueling and painful task when feeling uninspired. Fashion magazines can provide a little boost at times but celeb photos are a far better source of inspiration. It’s real people putting real pieces together to make a look that is worn out on the real streets. The glossy fashion spreads of Vogue and Bazaar are fun to flip through but who leaves the house looking like that? A yellow feather skirt and patent leather bustier don’t make a complete look for me!

Hey Mayor! I heard about Polyvore from another friend. How did you hear about it? And more importantly what do you think? Are you using it regularly now? — conducting my user research when I can..

Polyvore Look of the Week — Work Attire

I like to carry two bags with me in the event I need to downsize for an evening event. Usually the evening purse fits inside the larger bag with no issue. I like how this top is long enough to cover the rear — espcially important when wearing white pants since a lot of times they are can be sheer. I’d like to layer this shorter jacket over the whole look, a necessity in the office since I’m always freezing from the AC.

Ok I take it back… this site is actually pretty incredibly cool. After playing around with it for an hour — I’m hooked. I’d actually been thinking about this for the past 6 months or so… when would someone create a tool that allows online shoppers to browse repositories of fashion across all the sites? How annoying does that getting — go to shopbop.com, look for dresses, go to nordstrom.com, look for dresses, go to saks.com, look for dresses. I actually created my own quick links to various categories of clothing in my Kaboodle lists to save myself clicks. Bing Bang! ShopStyle finally got it. Time to go nuts ladies!

I also am finding their stylebook creator to be pretty nifty after all. It’s much more dynamic that I realized. The UI is well though out and seemingly engineered… with a few exceptions.

Features I’m Digging

1. Advanced Search for Fashion Goods
   What’s so great about ShopStyle’s search is the functionality to constrain your search down by brand, store, % sale, price, size — or better yet a combo of any of those variables.

   Here’s an example of how you’d select the stores to constrain the search by:

   + Click on item to see enlarged view

   

2. Set Price Alert
   I can see I’ll be quite addicted to this bad boy. How many times have you found something you wanted but wanted to wait until it went on sale to "close the deal"? Problem solved! Just set the "price alert" on the item in ShopStyle and you’ll be emailed when the item goes on sale. See below.

   + Click on item to see enlarged view

   

    

3. StyleBook Creator
   As mentioned in Shopstyle.com — A New fashion Search Engine or Another Fashion Social Network?, you can create stylebooks which are almost like your own fashion spreads, or features of items you think make a unique grouping or fashion statement.

   For starters, I’m hoping they give us more flexibility when re-arranging items. Currently, you got to click on each item to move it around spot by spot. See below.

   1. 

      What would be even better is drag and drop!

ShopStyle got one thing right.. and I’m not sure if they got there w/o even realizing they were doing it, but they’ve provided the ability for bloggers to create fashion feature sets/spreads like we normally do w/o all the extra work. Good job guys!

It looks like a new fashion search engine is on the rise… my guess is that ShopStyle wants to be much more than a search engine though. It looks like they’ve got a pretty good following in a short amount of time (93,058th rank on alexa.com. ShopStyle users can browse the items ShopStyle has cataloged from major fashion retailers like J.Crew, Saks, etc, then create "stylebooks" featuring items they like in a set or grouping — kind of like a spread in a fashion magazine.

The intro on their "About Company" page reads:

"Picture the fantasy fashion magazine—page after page devoted only to must-haves from the best stores and hottest designers.
Now imagine shopping straight from those pages, without leaving home. That’s the need ShopStyle fills for the serious
fashion consumer. And it’s just the beginning of a revolution in the fashion industry powered by technology.

Launched in January 2007 as the first and only shopping engine devoted entirely to fashion, ShopStyle.com gives
style-conscious consumers a place to shop the online stores they trust, all in one place. An aggregator of both
fashion and people, ShopStyle.com brings users together to build and share looks and Stylebooks with friends,
family and the fashionista network."

Any Good?

To tell you the truth it took me some time to understand what the heck I was supposed to find actually interesting or helpful on the site. Besides the fact that a few of my favorite bloggers (Shop Diary, Coutorture, Invade My Closet, and more) have accounts on ShopStyle… I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be coming back frequently. I think ShopStyle faces the same issue that the rest of the Fashion Social Networks like Kaboodle, TeamSugar, Stylehive, and Polyvore face… keeping the user-generated content high quality w/o stifling the community with regulation and governance. Tell me you don’t see a whole lotta crap in some of these sites! It’s tiring filtering through all the stuff that you’re not interested in.

I must say… they were not the "only shopping engine devoted entirely to fashion". Like.com came way before them.

What I can see is that they did a good job of
getting in front of the right people — the Fashion bloggers! It’s the
fashion bloggers who will lead the fashion movement online. Any way you
can get them to particpate within your sites/applications you’re on the
right track. In the next few years I gather we’ll be seeing a lot more
tools tempting us bloggers away from the traditional tools like
Typepad, Blogger, etc. I know that once the right tool is out there for
me, I’ll be saying goodbye to this clunky interface myself!

What I liked in Shop Style

Here are a few of the ShopStyle Books that actually seemed pretty good.

Mom is Coming to Town by Coutorture

Rainbow Bubbles by Coutoture

Paris in the 1940′s by Dita Von Teese

Things They Need to Fix

• Make it easier to link back to individual stylebooks. As you can see above I couldn’t even link directly to the stylebook.
• Make their widget editor more flexible for us bloggers to post within our blogs.
• Add less mainstream and more luxe stores to their index — Talbots? Speigel? Eddie Bauer?? Yech yo!
• I’m assuming you can’t add items yourself from stores ShopStyle is not already affiliated with… that suxe!

Go to www.shopstyle.com to start defining your own ShopStyle. Test it out and let me know what you think… I’m going to play around with it some more too!

I’ve noticed lately that my work/professional style has been slipping. It prolly has a lot to do with my Forever21 obession. I keep stocking up on cute trendy pieces… fit for a 21 yr old. Damn it. I need to restrain myself a little more… Look your age girl!

I spent the last hour focusing on work-ready wear and here’s a look I put together on Polyvore (See "THE" Tool for Helping to Decide What to Wear — Polyvore"). BTW Polyvore just added a color-picker so you can filter the items in the editor down by color. It’s pretty helpful if you like to use the items everyone else has added to polyvore. I find it easier to just find my own clothes and add them myself.

What I like about my work look:

1. A big a** bag for all my junk (Anna Corina Black Patent Leather Tote). All of you who know me know how much crap I tote around with me. I’m the girl you want with you when you stain your shirt, or get stuck in an elevator — always got snacks on me
2. A crisp shirt, structured just enough to not make me look fat. Yes, i do feel fat sometimes (fat is relative I tell you).
3. Flat shoes… I know I’m getting older as my average heel height shrinks.

I like to stand naked in my closet in the mornings stressing over what to wear to wear. Ok not really. When I can spare the time I can get lost for hours in my closet coordinating outfits, it’s fun for me.. even relaxing on some days, but on most normal days this is a routine I wish could be automated.

As far as I know no tool or service like that exists for outfit-automation but in the meantime, Polyvore makes outfit creation pretty damn fun — online! How it works is you install a plug-in to grab articles of clothing off websites which are saved to your editor where you can then drag and drop the clothes, layer then on top of one another and create an entire look or outfit. You can also browse sets of other outfits girls have put together using the same items you used.

See below:

An outfit someone created…

All the other looks/outfits others have put together using the same blue top.

Selecting what looks good with what is so much easier when you can see all the pieces and parts juxtaposed. I used to lay out the outfits for my blog posts in Photoshop but after EllleElle turned me onto this niftiness of this tool I was sold. You can use it for more than just fashion… furniture layout, etc. Again — something I used to do in Photoshop for HOURS.

It will be interesting to see where Polyvore goes with this tool. Jianing and team — best of luck and contact me when you’re ready for user feedback!!

As for those dreaded mornings in the closet once I’ve created my Virtual Closet product I’ll let you all know You’ll be able to record every item in your closet in a online catalog and sign up for a stylist service that coordinates outfits for you. Sound like a service?