The long tail of fashion

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen had a great talk today about how The Long tail of Fashion and how thousands of fashion bloggers exchange their creative work, learn about each other's ideas and problems.

Ulla-Maaria showed pictures of self made shirts and hats, ipod covers and said:

"Craftblogging is based on the idea that people like to create outfits. They can be t-shirts, tops, bags, skirts, hats or the very famous ipod covers. People blog a lot about them.
The biggest group of craftblogs belong to young woman, but not only woman, from older ladies to snowboarders, and skateborders. Outwear.com was established by a group in Finland and the business is developing fast.

Craftblogging is based on the idea that people like to create outfits. They can be t-shirts, tops, bags, skirts, hats or the very famous ipod covers. People blog a lot about them.

New forms of social and economic behaviour emerge around crafting, like sharing techniques (Stencil revolution, for instance) or swapping: you post something you like and expect to swap with someone that likes the things you do. You just post the picture of the fashion work is sent to you. Sampling & Personalizing is also beginning to be popular through blogging.

Ulla-Maaria also talked about ShowStudio:

“SHOWstudio is based on the belief that showing the entire creative process—from conception to completion—is beneficial for the artist, the audience and the art itself.”

Ulla-Maaria is always asked when she talks about it if there is a market and she took the example of Japanesestreets.com that grows on the fact that people think it is much cooler to buy clothes that your friends or yourself have made than the ones made by big fashion brands. The long tail of fashion will create a totally new market.

David Weinberger (who already posted about it) says that "marketers who look at the long tail usually say "great we'll be able to target markets of one" and you have made a great example of how wrong they are". Picture: Heiko.