It’s a Saturday afternoon, and during a mindless TikTok scroll, you stumble upon a slideshow of ‘Outfits based on your favourite chick flicks.’ The first shows a white maxi dress, alongside kitten heels, a Vivienne Westwood triple-row pearl choker, a blush-pink bra and a pink tiered cake, subtitled Marie Antoinette. The next, a mauvey-pink baby tee is paired with a Burberry nova check pleated mini skirt, a Dior bracelet, and black strappy kitten heels — Mean Girls. Studio Inés, a Puerto Rican-based stylist, uses collages similar to old Polyvore sets to showcase their styling skills, having amassed over 60k followers and 1.5 million likes on their TikTok page.
And it isn’t just them — countless TikTok users create similar slideshow posts with outfit inspo, as well as Substack writers, and even Pinterest users. It seems like there’s a longing for the days of Polyvore, a social media platform that allowed users to create outfit inspo pictures called ‘sets,’ alongside shop for clothes. It closed its virtual doors in 2018, but its influence on fashion during the early social media days is undeniable.
Polyvore and this new era of outfit inspo posts is undoubtedly inspired by paper dolls. To keep things short and sweet, historically paper dolls were the original fashion doll, and since they were cheap to manufacture, they could replicate trending fashion at a rapid rate. In the 19th century, these dolls would be included in magazines, alongside informative articles educating young girls on class, society, and how they should behave.1 (A boring Cosmo, if you will.)
Interestingly, Alyssa Velazquez explains that after a while, the once pre-cut paper dolls were instead sold as picture sheets, which meant that the person dressing the doll would have to carefully cut out the doll and their wardrobe first. They describe that this became ‘a necessary action for forging an intimate bond between a paper doll and its owner,’2 not too dissimilar to a Polyvore user having to carefully use the website’s snipping tool to first cut out the clothes for their set.
Polyvore was designed to be a rebellion against the toxicity of 00s fashion magazines, and instead be a transformative and creative haven for fashion lovers to try new ideas.3 In fact, an old Polyvore user described one time when they were itching to get home from school because they had an outfit idea involving Jeffrey Campbell boots and studded shorts that they had to make a Polyvore set about, stat.4 This ‘visual playground’5 created a social media where users felt empowered to be creative, and were less focused on numbers. And whilst there was a shopping element to the website, the main focus was the sets, which inadvertently gave an organic fashion education to young style enthusiasts. (I’m pretty sure I learnt about Valentino rockstud flats through Polyvore.)
Similar to paper dolls, there was a fantasy element to Polyvore sets; users didn’t really expect to wear these outfits, but instead, imagined wearing them in aspirational futures.
Of course, this is where the Polyvore Wattpad sets come in. Similar to young children playing with their Barbies — and in the most childlike interpretation of manifestation, hoping that one day they’ll be an actress with a pink convertible — early fans of One Direction and similar musicians would make Polyvore sets imagining what they would wear if they were going on a date with Harry Styles. Or a ‘study sesh with Zayn,’ or a movie night with the entire band, or what they’d wear backstage to one of their concerts… Every scenario Y/N got themselves into, paired with impractical shoes and flawless hair.
Polyvore dropped off in popularity before it was acquired by SSENSE in 2018, but there was a definite hole in the internet’s heart after it closed for good. But now, social media users have created a resurgence of these Polyvore-esque outfit inspo posts. This time around, there’s a little more realism to it — the sets tend to have a theme, such as outfit inspiration for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and serve as outfit ideas for viewers, instead of straight delusion. (Interestingly, a lot of these posts have comments of viewers asking where to get certain pieces, the complete opposite to the Polyvore days where you could shop the look, but that wasn’t the point. The point was creating exciting outfits and trying out new ideas.)
There’s still an aspirational element however, with sets including trending pieces like Ganni buckle flats or Adidas x Wales Bonner Sambas. Similar to paper dolls, these outfit inspo posts signal that the creator has a refined knowledge of trending fashion; they’ve proved that they’re stylish, without having to spend a penny on the pieces. (And why would you, if you could make a TikTok post and acquire views and followers without owning the clothes?)
Whilst the sets nowadays are more Ganni buckle flats than Valentino rockstud ballet flats, it’s nice to see that people with an interest in fashion can trial out outfit ideas and the hottest pieces, even if they don’t have the means to attain them.
Extra inspo from Pinterest:
Sources
1. Handmade Paper Dolls, Molly Sun for UChicago Voices. Read more here: https://voices.uchicago.edu/reproducingraceandgender/2020/03/18/handmade-paper-dolls/
2. Dressed Up in Paper: What Will I Be?, Alyssa Velazquez for Fashion Studies Journal. Read more here: https://www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/longform/2016/12/11/dressed-up-in-paper-what-will-i-be-wkehn
3. Fashion Democracy, Anna Jacobs for The New Yorker. Read more here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/29/fashion-democracy
4. The Death of the Flatlay: A Love Letter to Polyvore, Emilija from Team Whering for Whering’s blog. Read more here: https://whering.co.uk/thoughts/the-death-of-the-flatlay-a-love-letter-to-polyvore
5. Online Social Communities Through the Lens of Polyvore, Maansi Aurora for Rochester Institute of Technology ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Read more here: https://www.proquest.com/openview/b07721df14968ec2e9b85f4f7178c0a9/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
Image grid (from left to right): olivabadz on shoplook / jcstyled_ on tiktok / via Pinterest / kpez on shoplook / rest via Pinterest
Written & edited by Lucy Eaton
Posted 1 April 2024
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