Three years after it began powering the event management logistics of fashion week, Fashion GPS is going one step deeper into the seasonal editorial cycle. Its newest feature, Styles 2.0, launched today as a platform for PR agencies to push assets to editors when they begin requesting styles for shoots after the shows are over.
Starting in September 2011, editors could access Style.com-type runway images through Fashion GPS’s Radar platform. (There are a number of different platforms built specifically for PR agencies and editorial teams. We’ll try to keep them straight.) This gave them the ability to favorite shots, take notes, and request full looks.
Styles 2.0 breaks those runway images down even further, enabling PR teams to put up stills of individual products. They can then make it public, private, or downloadable as a high-res image for print or online publication. Depending on their level of access, an editor could theoretically pull a photo of a particular shoe straight from the site to use in a slideshow without having to request a Hightail file from the designer’s PR agency (or worse, have to call it into the studio to be photographed).
When I interned at a fashion magazine in college, I spent a good chunk of my time trolling through blurry iPhone photos of clothing items that my editor had taken on visits to the designer’s showroom after fashion week. Sometimes it was unclear if the pants at hand were… denim? Cute? Terrible?
So you can see how a tool like this would be really exciting. And with the steady integration of Fashion GPS’s technology into the different facets of fashion week, it makes a good case for ready adoption.
For the time being, the PR and production agency KCD has an exclusive on the Styles 2.0 platform. The platform will open up to other agencies in January, just in time for February’s show season. Still, a rep for Fashion GPS said that a safe 90 percent of runway images now appear on Styles 2.0 at this point.
[Image: Flickr / Maegan Tintari]