Finding your new fashion muse with Pinterest

How many of you ladies out there remember growing up scouring the pages of Vogue, ELLE or Modern Bride magazines looking for fashion inspiration? You would wait by your mailbox, favorite newsstand or book store for the latest issue to hit the streets, just so you could cut up and tear out images of that gorgeous dress, that pair of awesome shoes or picture of that must-have makeup look. I bet you can recall the very moment you found the perfect place setting, flower arrangement or even your wedding dress in the pages of your inch-thick bridal magazine.

Similarly, how many of you guys used to tear out car images from Road & Track or Car and Driver to hang on your cork board in your room or high school locker? Those images would hang there while you dreamt of that special day when your dad would come roaring in the driveway with one just for you.

We all had our dream board. Finding images and clippings of our travels and posting them was a rite of passage growing up. My two sisters used to have parties disguised as sleep-overs where every invitee would bring a few magazines over, spread them on the living room floor and clip, clip, clip, searching for that new fashion trend or idea to stay  fresh and up-to-date! This tried-and-true technique has worked for well since the dawn of paper and ink.

When all things digital came on the scene, fashionistas began to use blogs to reveal their most current muses.  They used Web 2.0 offerings like WordPress, Posterous and Tumblr to show off fashion sense and share dreams. While these tools were fine for cataloging fashion finds, searching, sharing and finding a mass audience was clumsy at best and really didn’t have the look and feel of those cork board and locker door days.

Well, those magazine clip days are back and they are back with a vengeance.

Enter internet darling and tech startup Pinterest. This new trend takes the clipping and cutting of images to a whole new, tech-savvy, social media-driven level. Started in 2009 and getting serious attention in late 2011, Pinterest was listed as one of Time magazine’s hottest 50 internet sites. By the end of 2011 Pinterest was generating over 11 million total visits a week, putting it in the top 10 of all social media sites. Currently with over 12 million users in the US, over 80% of them female, Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social media site around.

The main gist of this new, invitation-only website is to build pin boards and fill them with “digital clips” or style finds you stumble across in your Internet travels. You can also just upload images from your own computer, and add videos or even discussions as well as images. With Pinterest you share pins and boards with your friends or “followers” of your boards all from the comfort of your desktop, laptop or mobile phone.

Getting started with Pinterest is easy. Log in with your credentials and begin pinning. Actually before you go pin wild, I suggest you follow some of your friends to see how they are doing it. Pinterest comes with a default set of boards, which you can delete, rename or expand with more if you chose. These boards act as categories to organize your tastes, fashions or styles.

May I also suggest that you search out and find some of your favorite fashion oriented businesses on Pinterest. You can see a full directory here:
http://pinterest.com/mshahab/brands-businesses-blogs-on-pinterest/

What separates Pinterest from the old-school cork boards of day’s gone bye is the social media sharing aspect of the site. You “follow” other people’s pin boards, which means when they add new pins to their board, those pins will show up in your main follower feed for you to view. You can browse the “pins” they have pinned by others and comment on them. You also have the opportunity to “repin” any pin you find on a board that you have created. This share and be shared mentality of discovery is what makes Pinterest great.  The added bonus is you can’t get paper cuts from leafing through someone’s board.

Let your creativity go wild. Pinterest acts as your new fashion muse.