http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/students-startup-weaves-a-web-that-keeps-growing-20110914-1k9hi.html
''If you look at Wikipedia, a lot of the [fashion] designer or brand pages do not have a lot of information on them, and Wikipedia does not really focus on images, so you will not ever find the new collections or [fashion] look books on there,'' she says. ''At the moment, there is no central database for fashion, a location where a girl can find the latest look book for Marc Jacobs or the first collection for Chanel. Either they are not there or they are on a host of different websites, so we want to create all of that in one place.'' Sarah Stierch says: ...uh..it's called Style.com and it's the greatest fashion website, ever, and has been for almost ten years. (Always makes me laugh that people in the fashion world forget men are as into fashion as much as women are, too!) And I comment: Given my experience with Wikipedia's fashion coverage, I think I can speak to this with some authority. We did create a little external-link template for style.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Style.com_collection, that can be used as you would use the Facebook, Twitter or MySpace templates. It's, as Sarah says, an excellent resource. I don't mind the idea of the look-book thing-we could and should arguably have articles on notable designers' biannual collections, and there would thus inevitably be associated Commons categories, which would serve as look books. What we'd need-and this, it seems to me, is where wikifashion is failing-is someone who can take those pictures with a decent enough camera and can get access to the shows. Someone with some professional experience as a fashion photographer (cue Steely Dan's "Peg", from the now-deleted "Songs about fashion" category: "When the shutter falls / You see it all in 3-D / It's your favorite foreign movie ..."), in other words. The problem, though, is that these people are not usually open to freely-licensing their work. And even, I suppose, a Wikipedian with the skill set might not necessarily be welcome at a fashion show, not if it was known that they were going to create images that would undermine the commercial value of the work of every other photographer there. But, then again, we did get people into sporting events eventually, so I'm sure we'll eventually get someone into a fashion show or two. Daniel Case
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