Polyvore Nation

While catching up with some back issues of The New Yorker yesterday, I stumbled across this article about Polyvore from the March 29 issue.

“Think Black,” the title of the set made by Fabz_Reen, in Indonesia, is a reference to “Think Pink,” the exuberant opening number from “Funny Face,” the 1957 movie about the fashion world. The cadences of the film clearly still echo through the popular fantasy of what constitutes a fashion magazine: a dictatorial matron sweeping through skyscraper offices, as Meryl Streep did in “The Devil Wears Prada,” fifty years after Kay Thompson played a caricature of the legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, fretting about failing the “American woman who stands out there naked waiting for me to tell her what to wear.” In reality, the American woman has not waited to be told what to wear in some time. Vogue and Bazaar now compete with the more populist shopping magazines, like InStyle and Lucky, whose low-key editors have replaced lush, fantastical spreads with practical shopping advice and catalogue-style layouts. Polyvore’s user-generated model abandons the queenly paradigm altogether. The site has 1.4 million registered users, two hundred thousand of whom are, like Helmer, dedicated “creators”: amateur stylists who put together thirty thousand sets a day and post them on Facebook, Twitter, and their personal blogs. Kerry Diamond, an executive at Lancôme who has done business with Polyvore, describes sets as “the cyber equivalent of the inside of a school locker door.”

“Our mission is to democratize fashion,” Jess Lee, Polyvore’s twenty-seven-year-old vice-president of product management, told me recently, as she picked at a huge Caesar salad at Fred’s, the restaurant on the ninth floor of Barneys on Madison Avenue. “To empower people on the street to think about their sense of style and share it with the world.” She believes that the “Funny Face” days are history. “Newspapers and magazines are, like, these things outside that get wet,” she said. “They’re like roadkill.”

What do you think?  Will Polyvore, fashion blogs, twitter and the Next Big Internet Thing bring about the end of the reign of Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld as Grand Arbiters of fashion?  Or will there always be a place for glossy fashion magazines?
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22 Comments

  1. I still love reading my monthly complement of magazines and one striking difference that I notice between those magazines and the blogs I follow is EDITING! And it’s a big difference. I have to say that most of the important fashion magazines are ever so well edited. No spelling errors. Lovely grammar. No its/it’s confusion. Since I have some responsibility toward the next generation writing our language correctly, I am constantly alert to what that generation sees in print surrounding them daily — and on the blogs I read, that’s seldom an inspiring example. Newspapers don’t do too much better. But magazine editors are really on their toes. So I’ll keep reading them and I hope they’re around for a while to set the bar a bit higher.

  2. I doubt that 30 years from now, our daughters and granddaughters will be poring over archived polyvore web-pages and marvelling as we do at the exquisitely composed, beautifully photographed pages in Vogue. Polyvore is interesting but not compelling, and it is disposable. Vogue magazine has the power of an artifact unto itself, like those Hermes scarves—always different but encapsulating that particular moment of fashion within them. They are historical documents.

  3. I wonder about the fate of magazines as many newspapers are going paperless…Blogs have certainly peeked my fancy.
    I am a magazine junkie so this would be a sad demise for me…I love Town and Country, Veranda, UK Country Living, Vogue and Elle to name a few…I wonder if magazines would become the next hot collectible if they went the way of the dodo?
    Food for thought.

  4. materfamilias, indeed there are far too many blogs I’d love to take a blue pencil to (now that dates me, eh? I have actually used one on copy). But Une femme, Passage des perles and others linked to here are very well written.

    The dictatorship of the fashion mag editor or editrix (couldn’t resist that old feminine title) ebbed decades ago, but has simply been replaced by the naked dictatorship of publicity.

    I do glance at Vogue at newsstands and in the public library, but couldn’t be bothered buying it (in any language) as so little is relevant to me.

    As for pseu’s polyvore, I adore the umbrella – and once again note the Old Navy t-shirt in lead pipe grey. I bought one in a cotton-viscose mix last summer and it is surprisingly good quality for Gap’s low-end banner. There is a lot of shoddy junk in their outlets though.

    Hmm, when is pseu returning to Paris?

  5. I hope so. The fashion mags in general have not inspired me in a long time. As a matter of fact I am seriously considering canceling most, if not all of them. I’m finding more color inspiration in decorating magazines!

    I echo the sentiment of Couture Allure Vintage Fashion.

  6. Doubtful. I think people will always crave the hierarchy that magazines create. Resent it, but crave it simultaneously.

    That is not to say that blogs, Polyvore, and whatever comes next in Web 2.0 style tools won’t INFLUENCE how people think about style. But to say that mags are “roadkill”? I don’t see it.

  7. My amateur opinion is that `The big magazines´, the US, Italian, French,Russian..Vogues Elle´s will stay strong. Maybe one or two bigs more. That´s it. The internet with it´s multiple choices ( blogs,etc. ), tv and other than magazine media will be sufficient

  8. I don’t see Polyvore or the fashion blogs putting Vogue out of business. I agree with Sal, I don’t think that Polyvore influences fashion. I don’t think that people really want fashion to be democratized at all. After all, you make the decisions at Polyvore and many people don’t want that responsibility. They like having the fashion mags telling them what’s hip or hot.

  9. Love the glossy mags and think that they will be here to stay but also think that polyvore has a place too – the more the merrier as far as I am concerned….!!

  10. While I don’t think magazines like Vogue and Bazaar will disappear, I think their influence is dwindling. As a woman over 50, neither of these magazines is relevant to my life anymore. And both fail miserably in their attempts to recommend styles that work for my age group. Maybe I’m just pissed off after one recommended silver pants for women in their 50s, but I did not renew my subscriptions this year.

  11. I may be in the minority but I rather read fashion blogs than fashion magazines. However I think the magazines are about escape, aspiration and fantasy and those things never go out of style.

  12. I love Polyvore but I can’t take it on a plane with me, or on the ferry. I also can’t drift off to sleep while looking at it. I buy fashion magazines to pull together looks in my head and to share with my daughter. We write rude notes all over them and then pass them to each other. It’s funny how we agree on absolutely everything. So, there will always be the fashion mag in my opinion. The French Vogue is my favourite.

    I agree with Materfamilias’ comment about editing. (Should I or shouldn’t I add another s there? That one is open to debate.)

  13. Just for the record, I don’t think fashion magazines are going away anytime soon (nor would I want them to). Polyvore, fashion blogs and such are great, but can be overwhelming with the magnitude of voices and choices. And very little to filter the wheat from the chaff. Fashion magazines, whether you love ’em or hate ’em, offer a distilled down vision of the hundreds of thousands of clothing options, and it seems to me there’s still a need for that.

  14. Good question. Magazines, as in print, may go away like LPs did. That’s a question of technology and distribution. But the voice of authority will not disappear. Might be differently chosen, but will still exist. Since fashion is an art, not a science, arbiters are necessary.

  15. I am so honoured. Thank you. I read no fashion mags except at the hairdressers, which is like eating on an airplane, it does not count.

    Buy I read every New Yorker so skimmed that piece.

  16. Lots of people shoot video, but the masses still watch movies. [Though of course now we can watch them via DVD and streaming video.]

    That’s because films, like magazines, are a collaborative effort that often involve talented people. Mags might move to an online-only format, but that’s a medium vs message thing.

    So I agree with Katriona.

    I mean I know that poor old fashion mags take a beating–and I am right there tsking at model size and saying “who can afford this?!”–but the images they create are often very extremely visually pleasing.

    [Though I’m only engaging my eyes, the images tend to engage more of my senses…a neat trick, ha.]

    And a key reason they are pleasing is because a creative team’s concept has been well-executed thanks to location, lighting, styling, hair/makeup, clothing, photographer, and model. The same goes for decor glossies, really, only the appliances get bigger while the models get thinner.

    Most independent bloggers — and certainly polyvore! — can’t replicate magazine outcomes, but IMO that’s really their biggest strength: I love that technology allows people to share their own thing and expand my horizons.

    [Especially as the content is often much more entertaining and/or thought-provoking!]

  17. I love magazines; for me, they are pure fantasy,a pastoral world. Same with many catalogs. I hope they don’t disappear!