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| TrenderBender! |
| February 15, 2008 |
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Hello. I'm a fashion designer. You might wonder what a fashion designer does all day. Lots of things actually! When I'm not creating a collection, I am generally thinking about creating one. When that happens, one really important thing to do for a designer is to look for inspiration. How am I supposed to design clothes without inspiration?
Therefore I read books, I listen to music, I watch the news (not too much otherwise it depresses me...) I roam museums, I travel around whenever I can afford it and I look at people in the streets. I love to look at how people are dressed up on the streets! Who cares for the catwalks? Real fashion is not there! My research archive lives around the block!
I was surfing the internet recently and I stumbled upon a great website that really helps me out in researching what's up in the streets. It's called "TrenderBender" and it's amazingly easy to use, trust me!
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It's one of those social networking sites, you know, those where you log on and just share material with thousands of others. In TrenderBender's case, you share photos of people in the streets. You get loads of fashion pictures shot on city streets worldwide documenting how people dress. It's the simplest and most practical website I've seen in ages. You don't get confused by hundreds of icons and questions and sections....I hate that!
You simply go to TrenderBender, and right from the homepage you can immediately click on the first photo and start viewing albums, drag and drop your photos if you want to share them with the community. In 5 minutes you get to know what's happening fashion-wise in the streets the world over... |
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If you log on, you can upload your pictures on two different folders/lookbooks, a private one called a "scrapbook" and a public one that everyone can see called "top looks". When you have pictures in your "top look" section you feel have gone out of style, you just drag them out and throw them away or save them in your "scrapbook" (you know, trends come and go and maybe you'll put it back in "top looks" after a few months...).
It's like having a huge database of images that you can search by keywords. So if I'm looking for inspiration to design scarfs, I start from the homepage, look at the "popular tags", click on the "scarf" icon et voilà, tons of images of people in the streets with scarfs! It's as simple as that! And you also get pics of celebrities every once in a while. I came across these pics of Carine Roitfeld for example...
TrenderBender is updated regularly by street fashion addicts and it distinguishes itself because, as I said, contributions arrive from all over the planet. You can see the streets of Paris, Bombay, Sidney, New York, and so on. The website is new so it still has to grow, but you can already find so much inspiration in it!
We have two smart to thank guys for this very simple yet very effective concept. Their names are Axel Molina and Dave Bolton. They're responsible for this brilliant new research archive! I'm hitting the streets a little bit less than I did before, but I get a lot more inspiration now...
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