''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.
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