Purple Skirt

» see purpleskirt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Purple Skirt went live in November 1999. Tracey Ullman started it with Stephanie Laing and Jeannine Braden, and what they built was an online boutique with a magazine wrapped around it, at the exact point in the calendar when a famous person with a retail idea could raise money for it without being asked anything difficult.

The store carried clothing and accessories from designers who already had names next to designers who did not. What separated it from every other apparel site of that year was who wrote the copy around the merchandise. The costume designer Shay Cunliffe had a column on it, and so did the hairstylist Luke O'Conner. Ullman wrote one herself every month. The pitch was not trend forecasting. It was access to the people whose actual job is making somebody look correct on camera before nine in the morning.

It worked well enough to leave the browser. In 2001 the Oxygen Network picked up a spin-off called Tracey Ullman's Visible Panty Lines, which ran the same premise as television with industry stylists and sit-down interviews about how celebrities dress themselves. A fashion website turning into a cable series in 2001 is the rare direction of travel for that era, when almost everything was moving the other way.

In late 1999 I was fifteen and in Ankara on a modem, and the nearest thing to online shopping in my life was watching a download bar. Purple Skirt was aimed at American women with credit cards and opinions about hems. I was outside that market by age and by country both, and I am writing this off the archive like anybody else.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The site is easy to file under celebrity vanity project, and that filing is wrong by a couple of years. In November 1999 nobody had settled what a fashion website was supposed to be. The default assumption was that a website is a catalog with a checkout bolted on, and Purple Skirt ran it backwards, as a publication that happened to sell the thing it was writing about. That arrangement is now most of the commercial internet. In 1999 it did not have a name.

The other thing it had was a supply of expertise that existed nowhere else online. Set hairstylists and costume designers were not writing books and were not on television explaining their work. Ullman had their phone numbers because she had spent twenty years being dressed by them, and that is the part of the site nobody could copy by spending money.

~ the long tail ~

There is no shutdown post. The company is recorded as dissolved in 2006 and nothing in the record says why, which is its own answer. A site that quietly stops being worth the hosting bill does not get an obituary from anybody. By 2006 the category it had improvised was being run full time by people who did nothing else, and Ullman had gone back to television.

purpleskirt.com answers today. What answers is a WordPress install calling itself discountwomensclothing, with filler text and casino links on the front page, which is the standard afterlife for a domain carrying seven years of inbound links. The archive has the real one. You can still read the columns and the checkout buttons still render, with nothing behind them for twenty years now.

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