R.I.P., Style.com

With our coverage of breaking fashion news, year-round trend reporting, and the party scene, Style.com became a daily ritual around the globe, and not just for the designers, behind-the-scenes players, street style mavens, and party people we chronicled, but for fashion voyeurs, including one very famous outsider who with time became an insider. Speaking in 2014, Kanye West said, “I have a really poor fashion education…I had to learn about clothes through Style.com and Tommy Ton and shit like that.”

I’m trying to come up with a conservative estimate of the amount of time I used to spend on Style.com; my own calculations lean towards “years.” Years of my life spent clicking through slideshows and detail shots of ready-to-wear runway collections. I think this is slightly flawed self-reporting, considering most of those hours were spent behind the front desk of a law firm, and those hours felt…longer than normal hours. But waiting for the runway photos to filter in took up a large percentage of my day.

I worked at the law firm from 2008 to 2010, and at the time I think the delay between runway shows was just under a full day, which feels endless in retrospect. We’re so spoiled by the immediacy of fashion show coverage these days!! “In my day I had to walk uphill in the snow just to look at that Miu Miu collection with the cats and collars” etc.

At the time, I often felt like I was studying for something I would be tested on later. I was acutely aware of how much I didn’t know about fashion, like all the important names and dates and references and patterns I could just sense were flying over my head. I wanted to know, with no hyperbole, everything about everything. And, like Kanye, Style.com was how I elected to learn. Today is its last official day; soon it becomes “Vogue Runway,” described as “a new section of Vogue.com dedicated to runway shows and fashion news,” along with archives of runway photos from the last 15 years. I’m curious to see what happens next.