Love vintage clothes but not wild about pawing through thrift stores? A new website CHIC&youshallfind makes online vintage shopping easy. The site was founded by former fashion editor and Vogue staffer, Brenna Egan who decided to leap from the magazine world and into retail. Opening an online boutique instead of a bricks-and-mortar shop lets her keep the prices reasonable and sell to the entire country. The site takes a J. Peterman-style approach to sales spinning a creative yarn about each garment.

The site also features the Posh Pawnshop, an e-consignment area. Customers can e-mail rough photos of their items for approval and then ship them to the CHIC&youshallfind headquarters in Los Angeles where they will be professionally shot and uploaded for resale. Once it sells the customer receives the value minus a resale fee.

(luxist.com)

Being a lover of all things vintage, I had to check this out; I must say, it is one of the best sites of it's kind. It has a very "modern" look and all items are beautifully presented. Better still, is the fact that one can consign items with them. In my opinion, consigning with a site such as this who boasts a smaller volume of items might prove to be a bit more successful than eBay due to the volume that eBay handles.

They will feature your items for three months and if there haven't been any sales to that point, they will pay the shipping to return the items back to you......not a bad deal. I think I'll try it out.

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Always in step with the times, Janet & Janet welcomes summer with a new opening. Just a few days before the inauguration of the factory outlet-which opened its doors on February 27, to Serrà of the accounts in the province of Ancona-the mark of accessories from taste easy-chic comes now also on the Web, with an impeccable on-line store. A veritable virtual boutique, where you find all over the world of brand: collections of shoes and bags, but also the line casual Janet sport. With a few clicks, you can explore all the proposals of the mark, and make their own purchases wherever you are. Thanks to an efficient service delivery, shipments reach around the world in just a few days and, in the case of an afterthought or problems of size, it is easy to place a return or replace products.

(Vogue Italia)

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Though he has the conservative, steely eyed look of a lawyer-cum-news analyst, Dan Abrams really wants to be a Web mogul. And the past eight months have seen Abrams — NBC’s chief legal analyst and a former MSNBC host, most recently of “Verdict With Dan Abrams” — launch three online properties: Mediaite.com and GossipCop.com (which he cofounded) in July and geek-culture site Geekosystem.com in January.

Now Abrams is expanding into the fashion space with a fashion news and all-things-style-related Web site called Styleite.com, set to go live March 15.

“The fashion community is about two to three years behind many other industries when it comes to the Web,” said Abrams. “That does not mean that there aren’t some terrific Web sites out there — I think there’s going to be a great future for style and fashion on the Web. I just want to be a part of it.”

And Abrams is hoping Styleite will get him in the game. He’s enlisted Verena von Pfetten, a senior editor at Air America Media and former Huffington Post editor, to be the site’s editor in chief, while his former assistant, Ruthie Friedlander, will be senior editor of Styleite. (As with his other properties, Abrams will act as publisher and owner, but will not direct editorial content.)

“The goal is to provide an attractive home to people that is rivaled on no other site,” Abrams said.

To this end, and in addition to original reporting and analysis (à la Mediaite), Styleite will offer a user-generated section called Style Sheets, whereby users can post profiles and upload photos of themselves in their favorite outfits, which can then be tagged by fashion brand and style. (A user could click on “BCBG pencil skirt,” for example, to see all other user-submitted photos featuring that skirt, as well as pictures of celebrities who wore that skirt, if applicable.) While Abrams admits this concept isn’t exactly groundbreaking, he said his site will one-up others on the technology front. “No one that I know of has developed as sophisticated a technology to compare the same items worn by different people,” he claimed.

The same goes for the Power Grid section, which will rank some 2,000 to 3,000 “models, designers, brand executives, fashion photographers, fashion writers, modeling agencies, editors in chief, stylists, fashion titans and personal style bloggers” using a proprietary algorithm similar to the one used by Mediaite, he said.

And while e-commerce is in the cards, Abrams is currently in “active negotiations” and no partners have been confirmed.

In creating Styleite, Abrams has no doubt been buoyed by the success of Mediaite, which in January, according to Nielsen, had 1.7 million unique visitors and 5.4 million page views (up from 884,000 and 3.18 million, respectively, in December) and which Abrams expects will be profitable by the end of the year. Next up for Abrams is a sports site, SportsGrid.com, launching later this month.

(WWD)

That's exciting......looking forward to checking it out!

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Italian Vogue just relaunched its website with some help from a small team in New York. And everything is available in English! (Except the text linking to jumps in blog posts, which reads "continua" but adds fun foreign flavor.) The sections within the site are interesting: Vogue Black, Vogue Curvy, and Vogue Talents. Because these things must be examined on their own, apparently.

Vogue Black appears to be devoted to black talent in fashion. Today's top story is a video interview with Tyra Banks — in English. Tyra appeared in Italian Vogue's all-black issue. On Vogue Black she talks about how her run as a talk-show host is coming to an end, and reminisces about some of her most brilliant journalistic moments. Such as the time Hillary Clinton stopped by.

"I asked Hillary Clinton how she feels about herself when she looks in the mirror, like, when her clothes are off and when she looks in the mirror. And everyone’s saying, 'Oh my god I can’t believe you asked her that. oh my God.' But I felt so comfortable with her, I felt like she was just a girlfriend at home, so I asked her those questions. I didn’t know I was pushing the envelope by asking her things like that."

Moving on: Vogue Curvy is devoted to ... women with figures. That section leads with a video interview with Crystal Renn, who talks about how amazing life became when she decided to stop starving herself and eat salad with salmon and walnuts on it. (Since when is salmon a skinny person no-no? Modeling must be rough.)

Lastly, Vogue Talents seems to be all about up-and-coming fashion talents. However, it currently leads with a story on Rodarte, a label that is hardly up-and-coming at this point.

We were reasonably amused perusing Italian Vogue's new Internet collective, but why must curvy women, women of color, and burgeoning design talent be viewed in separate channels? Is it not possible to have a fashion magazine that embraces women of all sizes and colors who wear young and established labels? Italian Vogue seems to think not.

(The Cut)

Interesting concepts........I like it. Both websites are nicely done.

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