Remix American High Style with Polyvore!

I’ll admit that I get inspiration from somewhat odd places and three weeks ago, inspiration struck as I was reading the New Yorker and came across an article on Polyvore.  Polyvore is an online fashion community where participants use a virtual styling tool to cut and paste items from the web, then remix them into their own fashion layouts—background images paired with shoes, dresses, accessories to create any number of combinations.  Think of it as a web 2.0 Vogue, if you will.

After reading the New Yorker piece, I spent a few hours on Polyvore—in awe—realizing the site was a perfect match for our American High Style exhibition, which opens today.  I mean, seriously, we’ve got some great stuff in this show…imagine being able to remix dresses by Charles James, Norman Norell, Gilbert Adrian, Charles Frederick Worth, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jeanne Lanvin, Jeanne Paquin, Madeleine Vionnet, and Christian Dior…sounds pretty exciting, right? In typical Brooklyn Museum tech style, we had very little time to put this together, but I figured an e-mail to the folks at Polyvore couldn’t hurt.  Turns out, they thought this was a perfect match too and were excited to work with us.

We started working right away to upload the contents of the exhibition into the styling tool and get various components ready.  The online interactive is combined with an in-gallery kiosk and the Polyvore community can remix directly on polyvore.com.  As soon as we started to upload, the Polyvore community found our objects and started to use them in layouts.  They’ve been very welcoming to us and their love of the site and contents remind me of those early days (2006!) when we first started our Flickr account—people are friendly, chatty and they just love creating.  It’s been a joy to be part of this.  Take a look at this remix below—I couldn’t help but adore this when I saw it—it’s a favorite movie of mine and that’s our Charles James dress!

katharine hepburn in bringing up baby 1938 by The Bombshell. Check out more sets created by the Polyvore community!

Page 1 of 2 | Next page