Launching today at the The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam is Fashiolista, a fashion portal designed to inspire women, help them discover fabulous items and share their style.
With experience in building social shopping platforms for electronics, the Fashiolista concept took shape in the summer of 2009. Forming an advisory board of fashion chicks, the Fashiolista team set to work researching their target market, consulting fashion bibles Vogue and Elle, forcing them into a fashion mindset before realising its vision with the launch of Fashiolista.com.
Fashiolista is all about the social side of fashion. Every item on the Fashiolista website is handpicked by it’s members who are lovingly referred to as “Fashiolistas”. To pick items, a Fashiolista needs to install a special browser bookmarklet that, once installed, allows a user to start loving or favouriting garments and accessories at top fashion websites like ASOS, Topshop, H&M, Mango and many others.
When a Fashiolista has picked their items, other users will then be able to see them and give them more love. If a garment receives enough attention, the find is displayed publicly so other users can see what is hot on the Fashiolista website.
Users are able to follow and track individual updates, friending people who they believe to have great fashion sense. A user could suddenly find they have become an inspiration to hundreds of different people.
Fashiolista doesn’t require it’s visitors to be Fashiolistas to get the most from its website, its still very easy to browse and become inspired by some of the choice picks. Items are individually tagged to enable simple discovery of items but tracking the finds of different users reaps the most rewards, especially when Fashiolista emails you a weekly fashion update identifying what is hot and whats not as voted by the people you follow.
Photos by Anne Helmond, more The Next Web Conference photos on Flickr.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.