Paul Baines is a fashion critic and designer offering unique opinions and cool retro t-shirts at http://Buy-Tees.net. If you are a fashionista or if you just love to shop for the
latest fashions both on the net and offline, I have collated a list of
the top fashion social networking sites for the style addicts and
design freaks. They're almost as fun to peruse when you can do no more
than 'window shop' as when your wallet is full, the best selection of
clothing, shoes and beauty products, shop till you drop or make a wish
list of the best buys! I've not placed the sites in any particular
order, they all offer a great quality service. However, I have marked
my personal favourites out to show you what networks I use and why I
think they stand out from the crowd!
1. Fashionising
Fashionising.com is dedicated to fashion, this social fashion community
offering a news, photo and video service for upcoming and established
designers, labels, models and more. Very friendly and welcoming
community, mainly professionals in all fields of fashion.
2. Stylehive Stylehive.com is an
online style portal for people who love and/or work in fashion, design
and retail. You can connect with fellow style addicts and share all of
your new design discoveries and latest finds together. A trend-setters
social-networking club, part pop-culture lab , Stylehive.com is one big
ensemble cast of trendsetters creating, discovering and buying the next
big thing! [Love this site - want to make friends / work with real
designers? Go here!]
3. Kaboodle
Kaboodle is a social shopping network where people discover, recommend
and share products. Kaboodle’s excellent range of shopping widgets mean
you can begin organising all your favourite items in shared lists,
discovering new things from people with similar style. Easy to find the
best prices and discounts on the most popular products. This site
offers fashion products amongst many others including gadgets, soft
furnishings, art and more. [Love the site - however a competitor
wrongly classified my retro clothing site as 'Adult, I had no option to
remove their classification, so I have had to delete my
membership]
4. Thisnext ThisNext focuses its
online and social-shopping community more towards the next big trends.
Your popular votes count, everyone recommends their favorite up and
coming products for others to discover and purchase online. This global
community is in the pursuit of cross-cultural shopping habits for the
year to come. This site is laden with more branded advertising and
e-commerce solutions making it a more attractive media platform for
corporate marketing. The system encompasses each product in a process
of discovery, consideration, trial and purchase. Fashion is a big
favourite here. [Kinda Corporate but useful]
5. Stylefeeder StyleFeeder
is a personal shopping engine that uses a unique matchmaking system to
offer daily personal recommendations, just for you. It’s a great way to
find new clothes, shoes, in fact anything stylish and keep track of
what you’re shopping for online, using visual their bookmark options.
Great widgets for incorporating your style-feeds in to your personal
blogs or commercial sites. [I use this site to promote my own fashions
regularly - great resource for designers.]
6. ShareYourLook
ShareYourLook is a new fashion community for all trends-etters,
shoppers and designers, (currently in beta). If you read articles New
York Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue , you will recognise the
co-founder's name - fashion have appeared in The New York Times,
Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, fashion journalist Melissa Ceria. The format
is easy to use and on the eye: upload photos of you modelling your
favourite outfits, and let other members rate your look and leave you
comments. Don't worry, there is a policy of fair and objective
criticism, even compliments and most of all useful style tips. The
whole site relies on a great blog style tagging process, plus a great
feature where you'll be able to post favourite 'looks' to your network
of fashion friends. You even get your own “styleblog”.
7. OsoYou OsoYou is the UK's first social networking and fashion website. Focusing more on High Street fashion and all the latest clothing items, plus features on the hottest celebrity styles and a chance to share fashion with your friends via some innovative social networking options.
8. Avenue7 Avenue7 should be classed as up 'n' coming. From my research it seems to be aimed at a younger 'wackier' audience, if you're over 30 you may feel out of place (unless you're advertising your own fashions). They already use some rather clever programming to help you create your own perfect outfit and 'fashion scout'. However there are some even more promising features in the pipeline including 'The Fashion Show' and 'Start a Makeover'. This is more of a 'hot or not' direction for the field of fashion social networking, but it's bright, bold and adventurous and I'll take a punt it will do well in the future.
9. StyleMob StyleMob is
rather funky looking (though corporate owned) street style community
StyleMob offering a service that is part Hot or Not, part fashion
magazine and part MySpace.
10. TeamSugar TeamSugar is one of the latest contributions to the market. Backed by the Sugar Network, this series of blogs primarily targets fashion-conscious women. The most popular is PopSugar, where celebrity gossip and fashion come together in a hedonistic mix. TeamSugar pro-actively promote their content, encouraging their community to form around it. Blog syndication integrates the network - PopSugar, DearSugar, TeamSugar and FabSugar, encouraging users to switch sites to see the latest news on each one. Ultra intelligent marketing - helping to boost the popularity of the whole network at the same time. Standard social networking features friends list, leave comments, send messages, write a blog and voting in polls.
This supplemental list offers links to more general/shopping social networks that feature some fashion content:
Thefind
TheFind.com is the leading shopping search engine to find stores,
brands and products, bigger than any other product finder online.
Shopwiki
ShopWiki is a shopping search engine designed to help consumers find
specific products on the Internet with ease. It is the only shopping
search engine that combines advanced Web-crawling technology with
consumer-written wiki
Etsy Etsy is an
online marketplace for buying & selling all things handmade and
only handmade!.
Epinions Epinions a popular consumer review site.
Fastmatch (Very new and more 'social model' but in beta and the interface needs work.)
Selfploitation [A new site which focuses purely on artists/creatives helping each other to promote their products].