Weardrobe

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

~ the obit ~

This was a site for people who photograph their own outfits, and I am not one of them. The members were fashion bloggers, overwhelmingly American women, and what they wanted from the internet in 2008 was a place to post today's clothes and have somebody identify the jacket. I came to it from the other end entirely, through a list of hostnames that had stopped resolving.

The concept dates to September 2004, when Suzanne Xie and Rich Tong noticed there was no application for organizing the clothing you already owned. Weardrobe went live in January 2008 as the answer: a profile with your photographs on it, plus a virtual version of your real closet, built by manually tagging every item in every picture. In 2009 it was named one of twenty winners of Facebook's fbFund and spent the summer in Facebook's incubator in Palo Alto wiring up Facebook Connect, which in that year was the only distribution anybody wanted.

All that manual tagging is what made it worth buying. Like.com, which did visual similarity search for handbags and shoes, acquired the community on 18 November 2009 for an undisclosed sum and bolted on a feature called Likesense that identified the garments in a member's photo and linked them to a retailer, with Like.com taking the affiliate fee. Google bought Like.com on 20 August 2010 for a figure widely reported around $100 million, mostly for the computer vision team. Weardrobe came along in the paperwork.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sunset template ~

Five days is how tightly the archive brackets this one. www.weardrobe.com serves a healthy 12,236-byte page on 11 October 2011, and on 16 October the same URL returns 1,372 bytes. Every sub-page that was live on the eleventh answers 404 by the sixteenth. Google put Like.com and Boutiques.com into Product Search on 14 October 2011, and this is the same switch being thrown.

The replacement page is worth reading. Its HTML title is the internal project name, sunset-commerce. It carries the Google logo, then a second image file called weardrobe-logo.png whose alt attribute still reads "boutiques.com", because the template was built once and reused for every property going down that week. The text says Google is "redirecting shoppers from Weardrobe.com to Google Product Search", thanks you for loving shopping as much as they do, and points you at Google Catalogs and Google Offers beta. There is one sentence about the former Like.com team being excited, and not one word about the community that had been posting its own photographs there since January 2008.

~ nineteen bloggers in a room ~

In early September 2009 Weardrobe flew nineteen fashion bloggers to New York for a conference of its own, where the group exercise was customizing a pair of skinny jeans. It hired from its own membership too: Krystal Bick of This Time Tomorrow ran community, and Jessica Quirk of What I Wore came in as community director and drew the weekly contest images herself. For a site with no obvious revenue, that is a lot of effort spent on the people using it.

English Wikipedia still lists the status as Online. It carries a cleanup tag complaining the article reads as promotional, dated October 2011, which is the exact month the site was switched off. Further down, the history section describes a 2012 partnership with Urban Outfitters, an event placed a year later than the final working capture of the site the sentence is about.

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