Style.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

in 2000 i was on a modem where a page of forty photographs was a decision rather than a click. you looked at the thumbnails and picked two, then went to make tea while they came down. that is the correct frame for what style.com did, because publishing complete runway galleries on the web that year was not a small thing to attempt and i had no reason on earth to load one.

the domain had belonged to the clothing retailer express before condé nast bought it in the late nineties. it relaunched in the fall of 2000 as the online side of vogue and w, carrying fashion journalism and trend coverage. the part that made it matter was the galleries: every look from a show, in the order it was shown, free to anybody, within a day or two of the show happening.

before that, seeing a collection meant buying the magazine two months later and looking at the six frames an editor had selected for you. style.com published the entire run and let you decide what was interesting. the archive stacked up season on season until it was the reference nobody else had, used by people who had nothing to do with buying clothes, which is what happens when you are the only complete record of anything.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the first death ~

in 2010 the site was moved into fairchild fashion media, then brought back to condé nast at the end of 2014. in april 2015 the runway content was folded into vogue runway, a channel on vogue.com, and on 31 august 2015 style.com itself went offline.

the pictures survived and the address did not, which is a specific kind of loss. fifteen years of links from other sites and from forum posts all pointed at style.com urls, and every one of them broke on the same night. this is why the grave carries two dates. the thing most people meant by style.com stopped existing in 2015.

~ the store ~

what came back on 2 september 2016 was a luxury e-commerce site run out of the united kingdom, with franck zayan as president and yasmin sewell as fashion director. it did not hold stock. brands shipped their own orders and style.com sat between the customer and the label, stitching product listings to editorial pulled from british vogue and gq.

the reasoning was that condé nast already had the readers, so the readers could be pointed at a checkout. the trade press was skeptical from the first month, mostly about the range of product on offer and about the margins in a business where you own neither the inventory nor the logistics. sales came in poor and staff started leaving.

~ nine months ~

on 13 june 2017 condé nast stopped trading the site, effective immediately, and announced a partnership with farfetch instead. farfetch took the trademark and the intellectual property. the customer database and the domain went with them, along with whatever inventory was still in flight. condé nast kept the content side and moved to earning commission on products featured in its magazines, which is what it had been able to do all along without spending anything.

the reported bill was over a hundred million dollars for nine months of trading. the lesson is old enough to be boring and expensive enough to keep getting relearned: an audience is not a customer list, and the people who came to style.com for fifteen years came to look at clothes they were never going to buy. type the address today and you land on farfetch.

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