Fashion Research

[The Path to Grandmother Maple]

My flu has passed and I feel mostly like myself again, so I'll write a little about the scrapbook hobby that hits me every year about this time. I like to keep up with the fashion world and collect clothing design ideas. Spring fashion, being debuted right now, is much more interesting to me than the Fall fashion that gets debuted in March.

In the last year, the tools for fashion scrapbooking have gotten very portable. Like many things, I find that I can now do it completely from my iPhone. This is thanks to two free services, Style.com and Evernote.

In the Style.com app, I can look at all the pieces in any major collection from any recent season. If there's a piece that catches my interest I use the iPhone's built-in screen grab feature and email the images to Evernote.

[Spring 2010 Ready-to-wear collection menu]

[Thumbnails from the Max Azria collection]

[A review of the collection]

[The screen capture that I will send to Evernote. I love liturgical garments and this looks to me like a Catholic scapular turned racy.]

Once the pieces are in Evernote, I'll go in and add tags to help me find them later. This year my interest tags are handwoven, shibori, tribal, liturgical, color, scarf, cloak, cape, vest, jacket.

[Photos neatly stored in Evernote, waiting for tags to help me find them later]

Evernote is amazing because of the pervasive nature of the information. The notes are stored on the server, accessible from the iPhone app or any web browser. The app lets you store an offline copy on your phone by marking it as a favorite. There are also native clients for Mac and Windows that will synchronize your notes with the computer, giving you a local copy there as well. Any edits made anywhere will automatically sync to your other locations. If you clip data or images from a website that disappears, you will always have the stuff you clipped. (This is very handy for using Etsy as a source of inspiration.)

When I sit down to design my first handwoven clothing line in a few months, I'll print the images from Evernote for my design boards. Of course it isn't my intent to replicate another designer's style, but it would be foolish if I didn't avail myself of the design ideas and organizational aids that are free and right in front of me.

One of my long term goals is to hook up with interior and fashion designers to design and weave custom cloth for them. In the meantime, I'll just watch fashion from afar. It's my version of a sport.