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Who Needs Conde Nast? Gen Y Builds It's Own Fashion Platforms

Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on October 24

I’m working with Parson’s grad Kelsey Meuse to build out a Gen Y Research Collaborative and she pointed me to Lookbook.nu. It’s a simple digg-type platform where Gen Yers around the world are posting their fashion creations and getting rated by their peers. It’s simple, beautiful and wonderfully innovative in a quietly disruptive way.

What is most wonderful is that you don’t see anorexic models in pornographic poses manipulated by photographers and their fashion editor masters. You see authentic people in their teens and twenties wearing their own incredible fashions created by themselves. And it’s on their own culturally revalent media platform where they blog and comment on their work and have others post reactions and suggestions as well.

Why let arrogant boomers tell you what to wear when you can transform your generation from consumers to creators?

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Reader Comments

Rosalie Ames

October 24, 2009 04:58 PM

Hi, First these pills are so big I almost choke getting them down. and they haven't do nothing for me. Rosalie Ames

Rick

October 24, 2009 05:11 PM

Totally agree. Style and freedom from peer pressure is everything.
Take a look at www.winkifyouwantit.com
the first ever fusion of Clothes,Music,and
fun !
Can you believe it the models are actually smiling!

LeBlanc

October 25, 2009 03:21 PM

I can completely agree with this article. Lookbook.nu creates a friendly and mature environment for everyday sylish people to post looks and ideas, thoughts and create their own "label" per say in online. I just created one about 2 weeks ago. I plan to start showing my looks in a few weeks. And you can favorite a lot of looks and grab tons of inspiration from a variety of looks. Its also great for networking and expressiong "your" sense of fashion rather than the "industry's" sense of fashion. Everyone can be themselves. I thank the creator who made such a site.

Luis

October 25, 2009 05:45 PM

agreed. LB is an amazing platform for expressing individuality, the only con in my opinion is that it is an invitation-only website. which kind of just mirrors the pretentious and inaccessible fashion industry created by our predecessor generation. i consider myself a style-friendly person and would love to express myself via LB but i find myself merely being a spectator of this movement.

on a side note; does anyone know how to get an invitation code? haha.

Alexander

October 26, 2009 09:56 AM

If you want to see professional articles and background information with a non blogger attitude and quick user generated content style a good recherched article can be also quite interesting. Well sometimes critic is a good thing and the whole I love your style snippets are too much of youtube zapping for me. I mean even the big players react on those trends like Vogue.de from Conde Nast Germany:
http://www.vogue.de/community/ These arrogant Boomers also hand out Invite Codes for Lookbook.nu ;)

David Barrie

November 15, 2009 06:16 PM

Check out http://www.chictopia.com - this is my fave. totally exciting subversion of traditional top-down fashion approach. combined with indie fashion bloggers now becoming models, slowly but surely the entire system is being over-turned. this is *great*! :)

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Want to stop talking about innovation and learn how to make it work for you? Bruce Nussbaum takes you deep into the latest thinking about innovation and design with daily scoops, provocative perspectives and case studies. Nussbaum is at the center of a global conversation on the growing discipline of innovation and the deepening field of design thinking. Read him to discover what social networking works—and what doesn’t. Discover where service innovation is going and how experience design is shaping up. Learn which schools are graduating the most creative talent and which consulting firms are the hottest. And get his take on what the smartest companies are doing in the U.S., Asia and Europe, far ahead of the pack.

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