Photo: fimoculous / Flickr

In a move signaling their intent to get a chunk of the online shopping pie, search engine giant Google launched social fashion shopping site Boutiques.com last week. And, in a departure from Google’s previous design ethos – non-existent, pretty much – the site features no Google Adwords advertising at all, instead opting for a beautiful interface, with lush imagery.

What is Boutiqes.com?

Boutiques.com is Google’s imagining of how people will shop for clothing online. It sees the intersection of personal style, shopping and celebrities. Basically the company sees the service as a way for people to make their own boutiques, publishing their preferences online and sharing with friends. Yes, if you’re thinking it’s a social network built around fashion, that wouldn’t be too far off.

The ‘celebrities’ element is of particular interest, since it sees celebrities listing their personal fashion favourites and fashion sensibilities.

In this sense, it’s a lot like what Apple does with celebrity playlists on iTunes. It’s a brilliant move, when you consider how people and magazines have always used celebrities as their jump off points for any given season’s fashion trends. What’s more, users can follow specific celebrities and public figures so that they’re notified instantly on where that person is taking their style to next.

It works much like Twitter, and is actually pretty clever. How well it’s implemented will only be seen after some time, of course, when the user base is really putting those servers to work.

Search a key component

Coming from Google, you would expect search capabilities to be a central feature, and the search giant doesn’t disappoint with its social fashion site. Boutiques.com allows users to filter the clothes they’re searching for by colour, style, pattern, silhouette, style and price. There are even functions to filter items according to the mood you’re going for.

So, in future when you’re looking for ladies’ jackets, for example, you can filter according to other people’s tastes as well as your own. This social fashion approach to buying clothes is interesting, and is a grand departure from what we’re used to from Google.

Tags: fashion