Women and fashion are very closely tied. This booming industry is evolving in new ways and they aren’t just limited to the pages of a magazine. A new company called Style for Hire will attempt to help women everywhere solve their fashion dilemmas. The new site which just launched nationally, will offer the chance to employ the services of professional fashion stylists, from your very own closet.
The brainchild of style expert and co-host of TLC’s What Not to Wear) Stacy London and veteran entrepreneur Cindy McLaughlin, Style for Hire allows regular people to select stylists to help them go on a style adventure in their closets and figure out new flattering looks. The service even allows for shopping trips to help find new pieces to incorporate more style.
The idea for the site came about after McLaughlin was getting ready to jump back into the workforce and needed help figuring out what to wear. By providing the average American with the chance to get one-on-one help from stylists, the team feels they are bringing style to folks who might not have had access to it in the past.
After a soft-launch in Washington, D.C. in 2010, London and McLaughlin used that market to test demographics and services. London trained classes of stylists, each of whom is an independent contractor, and developed curriculum for later training sessions.
“Style is teachable,” London tells Fast Company. Her own approach involves examining the geometry of an individual’s body and selecting cuts and styles that play up the assets and minimize the problem areas. “A lot of people think this is about instinct, and you have to have some taste level,” she says. “But we believe very much in the science of styling.”
The national launch of Style for Hire dovetails with the emergence of styling as an industry in its own right. Ten years ago, the average person on the street probably had no idea what a stylist was. But thanks to reality television (including shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guyas well as What Not to Wear) and the explosion of celebrity rags that have made stars of Hollywood stylists (like Cameron Diaz- and Kate Hudson-dresser Rachel Zoe), all that has changed. The average US magazine-reading, reality-TV-watching American woman today now knows two things about fashion: Not everything works on every body type, and there are people whose job it is to figure this out for you.
“Women don’t feel so intimidated anymore,” London says, “but they still need people to guide them to the right purchases.”
Style for Hire has about 130 stylists on its roster today, with plans to add more as applicants get vetted and trained. McLaughlin said she expects to have 400 stylists in the network by the end of this year and over 2,000 by the end of 2014.
Would you use a service such as this? It should be interesting to see how well it takes off and whether other companies form to compete in this industry.
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