UK Edition
Meet the woman who has created a Google for fashion
Sometimes an idea seems so simple that most people can only see pitfalls. That’s what happened when Alexandra Van Houtte first pitched tag-walk.com to what turned out to be her toughest crowd: her family. Her vision was to build an online resource that stocked every look from every show in the four main fashion capitals, and additionally, group them into themes and trends. She saw it as a weapon for people working in the industry, but in less than twelve months it has become a magnet for anyone interested in fashion. “My parents kept saying, ‘This is so obvious, surely it’s been done already,’” the ebullient 28-year-old recalls.
They were partially right. There was a gap - and it was already partly served, by websites such as nowfashion.com and voguerunway.com which, particularly in the latter’s case, exhaustively mines shows around the world, including Tblisi, Seoul, Berlin and Brides (yes, really) Fashion Week.
A few professional catwalk photographers also grouped pictures by mood and trends. But no one offered the service free. Houtte soon discovered why. It took her the best part of six months, working seven days a week, to gather all her images – some 9,000 in all - and then “tag” them. Then she had to start all over again for the following season. There are currently 98,000 pictures tag-walk.com, including accessories, street-style and resort shows. ”We’re going deeper each season,” she says.
Despite its quantity of material, for its 30,000 (and counting) regular users, tag-walk.com is an exercise in simplicity. Type the appropriate search words and in less than a second, 520 or so pictures might pop up. Stripes, yellow, florals vinyl, checks, shine… whatever the season’s recurrent buzzwords are. It’s rapidly becoming an indication of the topics and names that are trending. These aren’t necessarily the ones promoted by mainstream sites. “What people tell us they especially like is that they’re being introduced to designers they might never have thought of,” says Van Houtte.
I test this out and tap in navy blue. Sure enough, the first three pages bring up Dior, Ferragamo, Versace, but also Creatures of Comfort, Gabriele Colangelo and Au Jour Le Jour. Tagwalk doesn’t take advertising, so there‘s no prioritising one label over another. It’s all done by algorithms and it can get really specific. Key in “florals on dark backgrounds” or “florals on light backgrounds”, “dominatrix”, “virginal” or “futuristic”, or create your own mood-boards. ”It’s all the sites I love but combined into one,” says Van Houtte.
Van Houtte’s grit was comprehensively tested when she worked as a styling assistant for five years for some of the most demanding publications in the business, including Italian Vogue and Numéro Magazine. “One time my boss was shooting on a celebrity and I had to call in every black dress that had been on the catwalks in Paris, London, Milan and New York during the past three seasons…” She grimaces. “It took me a week just to find all the pictures let alone secure the clothes. I had 72 rails of LBDs by the end.” That’s when tagwalk began germinating. “It would have saved me hundreds of hours of work.”
Van Houtte came to hate styling. “There are so many people wanting to get into the business and ultimately everyone’s chasing the same handful of outfits.” But if an education at Benenden, Princess Anne’s old alma mater in Kent doesn’t toughen you up, a bi-lingual existence between Paris, Switzerland, Nottingham and Beijing, where she studied Mandarin, does.
Watching power ebb away from the traditional monthly magazine shoot, she decided to reboot her career. “It doesn’t matter how lavish the set, nothing can compete with the influence of some Instagrammers. By the time the monthlies get round to publishing their pictures everyone’s seen the Gucci dress a million times and moved on.”
Tag-walk.com is another challenge to the existing system. Because of its agnostic approach to brands, small fledglings such as jewellery line Alighieri increasingly use it to launch and sell their collections. New designers pay £200 a month to feature on the platform – a tiny sum given the potential exposure. “Ultimately it may mean they don’t have to have a show or a presentation,” says Van Houtte. “That takes a lot of creative and financial pressure off them, and off the current show calendar, which is unsustainably overloaded.”
After less than a year, she has eight full time employees at her office in in the Palais Royal in Paris, and investment from Carmen Busquets, fashion’s most prominent fairy godmother (Busquets was a founder of Net-a-porter.com and an investor in modaoperandi.com and thebusinessoffashion.com inter alia). With her dashing tortoiseshell mane, and charmingly tough air of resilience, Van Houtte’s an inspiration for anyone who’s fallen out of love with their current job. “I was 27 and I was destroyed by styling,” she beams. She looks anything but destroyed now.