Need a place to unleash your divine fashion inspiration? Meet Polyvore.
Polyvore.com, a fashion-centric website geared for the inner stylist in all of us, allows users to create hypothetical outfits from real-life fashion finds.
Once you’ve completed the site’s free registration (which can be streamlined by signing up through one of your social media accounts), you can use the search function within Polyvore’s “Editor” pane to search products by category, brand, and store and to filter them by, price and more.
From there, you can select your favorite products to be part of an original look, which can then be published to share on the rest of the site. Once you get the hang of things, you can even style an entire collection.
The best part? Rather than merely being the stuff of style dreams, each look’s composite pieces are clickable and lead to information about where you can buy the finds that your closet covets most.
Sure, there are a plethora of style-minded sites designed to woo us into breaking our banks.
But, at its core, Polyvore seems, well, different.
Instead of limiting itself to being one huge sartorial collage, Polyvore tries to be the web equivalent to a big sister with a few additional years of being chic under her belt.
The site’s “Ask” feature— which allows user-submitted style questions to be answered by any other users on the site— is reminiscent of pre-first-date fashion panic and improvisational style woes.
The “follow” capability, on the other hand, which allows users to express their admiration for fellow users’ editorial eyes, feels much akin to sneaking a peek into the said sister’s closet, in hopes that some miraculous flash of fashion wisdom will come out of it.
Polyvore is the perfect tool for amateur and professional stylists, alike, to quickly and efficiently assemble ready-to-wear looks from contemporary sources and curate their runway-worthiness. For those divas who geek out on fashion business, Polyvore also offers brand- and shopping-site-specific analytics, giving them an inside edge on the future of fashion. Yet, its warm tone and inclusion of pieces accommodating a variety of price points makes it an invaluable resource for the everyday working woman who just wants to look gorgeous and have fun.
By successfully navigating the tightrope straddling exclusivity and audience-minded entrepreneurship and combining the best of social media, consumerism and streamlined style, Polyvore has won the heart of this dorky diva and it will win yours too.
