Two fledgling sites have entered the race to become your day's primary time-waster, guilty obsession, and/or respected go-to source of inspiration. Time will tell for Couturious, an interactive virtual styling tool and Nowness, a daily dose of fashion-y culture, respectively.
As the Internet as a shopping experience evolves, the conundrum of trying on clothes before buying has been a primary concern. Couturious aims to solve that with a 3D model and interactive styling capabilities wherein the user may put together outfits and pieces and view how they would wear on a "real" person. Borrowing snippets of fun from sites like Polyvore that allows for endless collage-building possibilities, Couturious will aggregate its content from the web at large, host the dress-up session, and direct users to respective vendor sites in order to purchase their test-driven goods.
The site is divided into sections to create outfits -- we are particularly fond of the mirror tab that lets you see the back of your ensemble -- and can be customized by body type. Otherwise, there's a list of featured designers (good ones, too, including Yigal Azrouel, Tibi, Tory Buch, Charlotte Ronson, Alice + Olivia and Cynthia Rowley).
There's potential for great fun, we'll just have to get used to the somewhat bizarre-looking virtual paper dolls on their manufactured backgrounds.
Shifting gears, Nowness offers a once-daily topic spanning arts and culture as it mingles with the fashion world. Sort of like a fashion-heavy flavorpill, if you will. Today's topic is hair, with two stories that include a clip of model Lily Donaldson's two-second hair toss stretched into a bewitching, slow-motion two-minute film by her father, photographer Matthew Donaldson. Also featured is a blurb on renowned hair stylist and pioneering photographer and stylist, Ara Gallant, who created a new genre of hair-flipping photography with Richard Avedon, and will be remembered in a book out this month.
It's this type of hyper-specific morsels that we believe will sustain Nowness' intrigue. You've got a Love / Don't Love option for each day's stories as well, which plays out in a ranking system under the Explorer option, which showcases the most popular stories on Nowness.