Consumerism: What and how to buy on VFILES
WONDERZINE DEADS, how the famous online stores are arranged: what to buy and what to look for when delivering. This time we are exploring the American VFILES.
From the very beginning, VFILES was bigger and better than an ordinary online store - a full-fledged platform that brings together brands, young designers and their future customers. The project was launched in 2012 by former V Magazine editor Julie Ann Kay, who worked for several years together with American fashion photographer Stephen Meisel and the supermodels of the 90s. In just over a year, VFILES not only grew into a beautiful and functional social network for fashion lovers and the main place to buy street clothes in New York, but most importantly it became a store with competent integration of customers in the search for necessary goods. Even the Style.com edition sings the praises of the project.
Julie Ann Kay was born in Australia and began her career working as a seller at an Esprit store. Then she joined the Australian Vogue team, for whom, it seems, she did everything from editing work to packing boxes with shoes. With the move to New York, Julie met fashion photographer Steven Meisel, whose manager has been for seven years. It was in the 90s: Ann Kay found the top models, grunge, Madonna and Versace. After working with Richard Avedon, she gradually moved to V Magazine. Not surprisingly, the next step for Julie was to create the most progressive store in New York and an online project dedicated to fashion.
At the very beginning of her career, Ann Kay was collecting a binder of magazines, covers and clippings were collected at her home in tons. She has always believed and still believes that street style and blogs are good, but it is much more important to keep and make available what was created by the best minds and hands of the industry in the past. So, launching VFILES, first of all, Julie created an archive of journals on the site, with which she had collaborated in the previous five years: V, Visionnaire, VMAN. Now the content in this section is filled by the users themselves.
Today VFILES consists of three large sections: Feed - where visitors, designers and the editorial staff exchange pictures and form mudbords; Shop - actually online store; TV is a place where you can watch author's reality shows, documentaries of models and the fashion world, shown from the inside, and just classic fashion videos for hours. Besides the fact that VFILES is one of those places on the Internet where you go to look with one eye, and then you find yourself there three hours later, this is also an excellent example of how to collect relevant time stamps in one place and grow your own consumer community supporting the store. By the way, the style of dressing the American youth, who is not afraid to break the rules in fashion and purchased at VFILES, is being watched on Instagram by the main stylists of the world - maybe you should follow their example?
At some point, I thought, why not collect everything in one place - online - and with the opportunity to share my pictures with the world. It was one of the key ideas of VFILES, which was originally conceived not just as an online store, but as a social project, as a community of people connected with fashion. Because fashion is personified for me not by a casual cut of street or catwalk fashion, but by a community of professionals: Stephen Meisel, Mario Testino, Christy Turlington, Freya Beha, Naomi Campbell, Pat McGrath - they are fashion for me.
Feed
In the Feed section, all users authorized through Facebook exchange pictures. Under the hashtags you can find a lot of inspirational photos on the topics: # Make-Up, # F / W 2014, # 90's, #V FILES made fashion SS15, #Made in the USA - this is all a real fount of mindboards for stylists and photographers. There is even a separate hashtag #Rihanna, whose contribution to the style has recently been awarded the CFDA Awards. Here you can subscribe to user accounts whose selection of pictures you like.
In addition, for young designers, VFILES is a serious platform for promotion. Anyone can upload their collection to the site and get into the general VFILES show during New York Fashion Week. For example, last season the collections on the VFILES show were shown by the French brand Sarah Schofield and Agatha Kowalewski (ASS Sarah, Korean Xen Xie, German Melitta Baumeister, and Anna Trevelyan styled the show itself) as a result all participants got into the Style review. com, which is already a lot. Thus, thanks to VFILES, young designers very quickly find themselves under the gun of important publications and get a platform for selling their collections on the project website. Already, novice designers upload their collections on VFILES to participate in the show next year.
Shop
VFILES online store sells men's and women's clothing, accessories, shoes, fashionable press (The Pin Up Magazine, EY! Magateen, Collezioni, BUTT Magazine), home and interior items (from a baby carriage to a toothbrush), as well as vintage Stuff from old collections Jean Paul Gaultier, Céline, Moschino. You can even buy vintage skis Chanel. There is a section with seasonal sales, where now they give things with a 50% discount. A separate tab is devoted to Hood By Air things, which were not immediately understood by fashion critics, but not so long ago received the most prestigious prize for the young brand - LVMH.
VFILES sells items from both renowned designers like Kokon to Zai, as well as newbies Nasir Mazhar and Meat, who are adored by Azilia Banks and other celebrities. In the women's section you can buy Meadham Kirchhoff tiaras, a shiny Vivienne Westwood jacket, latex dresses and Meat skirts, lucky swimsuits and plush bags in the form of Ashley Williams sharks, Ashish sequins, acidic Crop tops made from plastic ASSK, Jeremy Scott things, t-shirts Whatever 21 with pixel-decaying Nike and adidas logos for $ 25. In the accessories section, you can find everything to be hung in gold like M.I.A., and in the shoe section - exploded platform shoes and rubber brogues.
The store, of course, has its own clothing brand, VFILES and VFILES Sport Plus, which includes hoodies, bermuda shorts, leggings and crop tops. At the same time, VFILES make collaborations with the NASA office - T-shirts, hoodies and slippers with the Nike logo converted into NASA will cost about $ 100; collaborate with stylist Anna Trevelyan, who invented the collaborative line of street-clothing VFILES x Machine-A for the project. In offline space, these items can be found in the VFILES store on Mercer Street in New York, while the online store delivers goods worldwide, and you can track the delivery of your order directly on the site.
Tv
The project has its own television, and in the corresponding section of the site there are as many as 15 television shows. VFILES Sales Manager and TWELV MAGAZINE Editor-in-Chief Daniel Greco leads Out Out of Hearts about the relationship between music and fashion and the DANIELLE LIVE! Program - Overview of new arrivals and brands from the store VFILES. In the latter, you can see how sit, for example, mini skirts Nasir Mahzar. Another gear - "What the F * shion?" - the actress and comedian Casey Jane Ellison leads, in her she talks about fashionable mistakes, discusses the influence of feminism on street fashion and jokes about food. Stylist Miley Cyrus Liza Kathnik is responsible for the show "LisaTV", which studies street style and pesters people with questions about what they are wearing. However, one of the most ironic products of the television division VFILES has become the reality show "Model Files". He is led by the casting director and adept normcor Preston Chaunsamlit, he talks about the fashion industry from an insiders point of view, but the main thing is that he calls not to take fashion too seriously.
Photo: VFILES, Soulcycle