Looklab Screenshot | Source: Looklab.com

NEW YORK, United States — Finding fashion products online that fit personal parameters like taste, style, size, body shape, eye colour, hair colour and skin tone; are right for a particular mood or upcoming event; and can be nicely mixed-and-matched with the existing contents of a user’s closet, all while quickening the pulse and providing a feeling of discovery, is a problem that offers tremendous opportunity for would-be innovators.

In a detailed blog post last month, leading movie subscription service Netflix, known for having one of the world’s most effective personal recommendation engines, revealed a remarkable statistic. “We have adapted our personalisation algorithms… in such a way that now 75 percent of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation,” wrote Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico, who work in the company’s personalisation science and engineering department. But in the complex market for fashion, with its subjective tastes, trend cycles and gatekeepers, many debate whether Netflix-style recommendation algorithms are the answer.

The failure, last September, of Google’s Boutiques.com — a fashion site that promised perfectly personalised product selections powered by “machine learning” — seemed to sound something of a death knell for purely algorithmic recommendations in fashion. And yet, despite the spectacular rise of social curation sites like Pinterest, which features thousands of fashion products hand-picked by humans, simply presenting users with items shared by the people they follow is also an imperfect solution to the personal relevance problem.

Now, a number of ambitious start-ups are aiming to offer consumers more sophisticated personalised product selections and styling advice by building expert curation into their online business models.

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LONDON, United Kingdom – By now, social media marketing has become de rigueur for luxury and fashion brands looking to engage end consumers. And indeed, more and more luxury brands are following in the footsteps of first movers and building community-oriented experiences that allow fans to upload their own content which (once carefully curated) can be shared across these sites and the wider social web, earning attention in a way that’s often more cost-effective and authentic than traditional advertising units.

Back in 2009, Burberry led the charge with Art of the Trench, a website that enabled fans to explore, upload and share street-style images featuring Burberry trench coats. According to a presentation on future advertising models by digital agency Made by Many, the site attracted over 330,000 visitors, earned the equivalent of £6.8 million in press coverage and drove an 85 percent increase in trench coat sales, all in the first three months.

But while early adopter Burberry succeeded in driving both positive PR and business results, what about those who have followed in its footsteps? In recent cycles, Hermès, Tiffany & Co. and Bergdorf Goodman have all launched similar initiatives. And just last week, Jimmy Choo previewed its own community-oriented street-style site, Choo 24:7 Stylemakers, at a breakfast at London’s chi-chi Arts Club. Taking its cues from Art of the Trench, which engaged Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman to shoot many of the images that populate the site, Jimmy Choo hired street-style photographer Eddie Newton, as well as street-style darling Caroline Issa, who is acting as London brand ambassador.

BoF spoke with Dana Gers, Jimmy Choo’s global senior vice president of communications to learn more.

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NEW YORK, United States — What makes a successful fashion film? Is it a strong visual concept? Content that can be quickly parsed? A savvy distribution strategy? Humour? Provocation? A famous model or a catchy soundtrack? Creating compelling fashion videos has always been more art than science. But as we set about compiling our ranking of this season’s best films, we saw some interesting commonalities.

While Cartier’s 3-minute CGI epic “L’Odyssée de Cartier” — which has appeared on network television and earned 14 million views on YouTube in just over a month — is a clear exception, the average length of the most successful films has dropped noticeably from just a few seasons ago. Indeed, several of this season’s top picks, including films from Lanvin, Prada, ASOS, Alexander Wang and Balenciaga, are better attuned to the short attention spans of today’s internet users and last no more than 1.5 minutes, a length that could shrink further in seasons to come.

Unlike the Cartier film, many of the season’s best videos also avoid cost-intensive cinematic grandeur in favour of the unconventional techniques and quirky aesthetics that seem to resonate most online.

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