I’ve been using the site Polyvore for probably 7-8 years now, maybe longer. But I can’t link you to it. Two weeks ago, Polyvore announced that it had been acquired by SSENSE and stopped all operations. There was no warning and the site went down that day with no plan to ever resume their original purposes. The site now links directly to SSENSE, which is an e-commerce platform selling designer items.
I had used Polyvore since the dawn of my internet presence when my dad still monitored my accounts online. My first Polyvore account is still registered with his email. Polyvore provided a space to combine images and products into happy collages, with many different styles seen on the platform. I’ve put some of my favorite sets below from my secondary account created five years ago and you can see the stylistic changes (data from my first account has not arrived yet).
For a lot of us, it helped us to keep up with the trends while not being able to buy the clothes, allowed us to create looks with designers items we dreamed about, and enabled us to make friends with others who appreciated fashion or the same fandoms. Polyvore is one of the reasons I got into fashion in the first place. Polyvore actually gave me my first designer bag when I won one of their contests. Polyvore was the longest social platform I’ve actively been on.
I was super mad at first, and now I’m actually sad. I don’t know the whole story, so there’s no use in pointing fingers. If you had been in the past posts on my blog these past two weeks, you would have noticed half of the posts missing pictures because all of my Polyvore widgets stopped working. So many of us depended on this website to further our creativity.
Polyvore, you were a consistently pleasant presence in my life, always inspiring me to try new trends, make new friendships, and create new content. You will be missed (but I secretly hope you will come back). Thank you for all the good memories of growing up with my friends and cousins having contests to who could create the best images, thank you for bonding me with internet and fandom culture, thank you for consistently inspiring me, thank you for planting the seed for my career, thank you.
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