Searching for Fashion

Fall Fashion Week has become an eyeball sweepstakes online in recent years as most of the major style brands vie for traffic. While many fashionistas already have their bookmarked circuit of blogs and sites to consult whenever a new style hits, other casual observers probably rely on a simple Google search to get the latest. In fact, some media brands brag about their high placement on a “fashion week” query at Google, suggesting that their brands have become synonymous with the event – or at least in the eye of the search engine algorithms.

And so I did my own search this weekend to find what I guess to be the official Mercedes Benz-sponsored site has floated to the top of the organic listings. Tis a pity, because it is the butt-ugliest of the relevant destinations. Using an election year motif of campaign-style buttons and signs, and without a single frock in evidence on the home page is a staggering misstep. NYMag.com once again wins the top slot among organic listing from branded media. Both Elle.com and Glam.com bought their way in with paid AdSense placements. You need to plug in the more specific “Fashion Week Spring 2008” query to bring back a deeper trove of media hits, including InStyle.com, NYTimes.com, and the Coquette blog within the Glam Network.

Fashion Week, with its scores of designers and thousands of runway images, has to be a bear to program. Most sites like Elle.com and NYMag.com feature directories that let the user drill into specific designers. There is still something to be said for instant gratification, however. While visually less polished, the Coquette blog at least fills the landing page with select images from the runway in a long scroll.

Odd as it may seem, I find the show most accessible through CondeNet’s Style.com Mobile app on the iPhone. We covered this is a news note the other day. But in using the phone application over the weekend I found that the drill downs into designers, thumbnail galleries of fashions and snarky comments from the staff on the back side of the images were superb. The blog entries kept me up to date on the dish. For the casual observer this was a more compact and edible Fashion Week. Mark my words, mobile design imposes an information discipline on digital content that many Web sites forget. A slimmed down but well-wrought mobile application could easily trump and pre-empt a brand’s Web coverage.