Model Moment at Private Party with Soma Magazine and Diesel

Posted on by Ashley Laurel

When you get an invitation to a private party for fashion insiders, you don’t say no.

Last week I received an invitation to a dinner hosted by Soma magazine and Diesel at Diesel’s San Francisco flagship location. Just as I was sipping on my first Cosmo I was approached by one of the Diesel team and Ali Ghanbarian Publisher and Editor in Chief of Soma magazine and asked if I would model a pair of jeans. Of course I said yes! Then I was told I could keep them, along with the shirt of my choosing. Double yes!!

Behind-the-scenes model moment

I headed to the dressing room with four other girls where we were each outfitted in a different style of jean and top. I tried on Diesel’s Flairlegg jean and instantly felt comfortable and confident in them.

All smiles behind-the-scenes

It was nice to meet a group of girls who were all very friendly and ready for some fun. We took way too many pictures in the dressing room as we were getting ready, each admiring the others’ jean styles.

According to many, I was the model with the most personality (which I hope is a good thing). Not all of my moves were caught on video, but here’s a sneak peak at the event.

After cocktail hour, we enjoyed a lovely catered meal, complete with flowing laughter and wine. There was a little bit of tech present too. At each place setting a chunky silver watch was used as a napkin ring, as a gift for each girl. And there were small cards prompting attendees to tweet using #dieseldinner.

Just before dessert it was time to model. Each of us was called up to the “front” of the room and asked to show off her jeans for the rest of the dinner party, while a Diesel representative, and special host Yuan Zhang of ShopNear.me, explained the best ways to style each jean.

Overall I had a wonderful evening and couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to share it with.

After a four year hiatus, I can add model back on my resume.

Check out the blog post from another model of the evening, complete with more photos, over at Complacency Kills.

Vivienne Tam Mini 210 PC Giveaway at Digitally Chic One Year Anniversary Celebration

Posted on by Ashley Laurel

GIVEAWAY: Enter for the chance to win a Vivienne Tam Mini 210 PC from Pretty Innovative.

Winner will be announced at the Digitally Chic Anniversary Celebration on December 2, 2011.

Vivienne Tam Mini 210 PC

I love chic gadgets and in honor of Digitally Chic’s one year anniversary, I’m very excited to be giving away this brand new “digital clutch” first introduced during New York Fashion Week as part of Vivienne Tam’s Spring 2010 collection.

To enter the drawing, simply describe or show how you would style an outfit around this adorable gadget and register for the Digitally Chic Anniversary Celebration. All entries must be received by 12:00 midnight PST on December 1, 2011 and you must be present at the event to be eligible.

The drawing will be determined by the following types of entries:
1 entry for adding a comment to the blog post
2 entries for sharing this post on Twitter or Google+ (counted separately)
4 entries for creating a board on Pinterest inspired by the notebook
6 entries for creating a set on Polyvore using an image of this notebook
6 entries for creating an outfit post on a personal blog inspired by the notebook
*All entries not including the blog comment, must include the hashtag #DCbday.
**Only one submission per entry type will be counted

Source: alibaba.com

And, in the spirit of the season, I, in conjunction with Digitally Chic, will be giving a second Mini 210 (courtesy of HP) to Family House, a home away from home for families of children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

So in the next two weeks get creative! And then throw on your dancing shoes and come out and meet up with the DC gang at The Summit on December 2, 2011 for our biggest event yet!

Click the Eventbrite link to register, and to learn more details about the night. The night will include door prizes, raffles, dancing, and more. Excited yet?

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This contest is now closed.

Bay Area Style Blog Favorites

Posted on by Ashley Laurel

Awhile back I wrote about my favorite fashion blogs, and now I have a few more to add into the mix:

Kitties + Couture

This blog is written by Maria Morales, a Senior Advertising Marketing Manager at Kaboodle, and all around well dressed, nice girl. I love how she pairs such bold colors and shapes together in her looks. My two favorite looks: Liquid Champagne and Funny Face.

It’s Because I Think Too Much

Kaboodle’s Community Manager has a fashion blog as well. She says she’s had a shopping addiction since 2007, so its nice to see her time going into amazing looks like Sheer Silk and Leather Shorts. Her blog also covers nail art and what’s in her cosmetic bag. And if you’re lucky enough to meet this girl in person, you will be in for a real laugh, because she’s a riot!

The Fashionista Lab

Adelle McEleeven first launched this blog while spending a year in Tokyo, before relaunching it in 2008 upon arrival to San Francisco. Great locations to inspire a unique fashion perspective, right?! Her blog covers fashion news and her personal style.

Fashionably Ashley

Ashley Gustafson, a fellow co-founder of Digitally Chic, writes a lifestyle blog, jam packed with fashionable life updates like her trip to WWDMagic. And both in person and online, Ashley’s casual style has just the right amount of punch from well chosen accessories, usually in the form of great bag or hat.

Other posts you might enjoy:

Four Style Blogs I’m Addicted To

Three Ways Mainstream Magazines and Fashion Bloggers are Collaborating

Free People’s Fashion Bloggers Introduce Themselves Through Flickr

ShopNear.Me Merges the Worlds of Online and Offline Shopping

Posted on by Ashley Laurel

Whenever I go shopping for clothes in San Francisco I tend to just focus on the area around Union Square. Two reasons: I know what I want and where I want it there, and I’m usually short on time. But it’s nice to know that I can cut down on time even further by using ShopNear.Me.

The App’s Usability

ShopNear.Me a new iOS app that gives users information about sales and arrivals at stores they care about. Users can also set up alerts for their favorite stores, and browse the app by products so as not to miss out on a great piece by sticking to their usual stores. Without waiting until there’s time to visit new stores on a whim, users can browse products in their San Francisco neighborhood of interest for goodies they love. Though right now the app features mainly boutiques in Hayes and the Marina, the team is working to expand coverage into the Mission and SOMA.

And the best part, is that coming soon, users will be able to reserve items while on the go.

You won’t have to be torn between seeing an alert go by about beautiful shoes you don’t want to miss out on or attending a startup’s launch party. You can do both!

The Team

I recently had a nice chat with co-founder Yuan Zhang, whose role entails business development, marketing, PR, raising funding, and investor relationships. Phew! But she said it doesn’t feel like work.

According to Zhang, shopping is “a visual experience”, and this app fits that desire of consumers. There are apps out there that list store directories, or sites like Yelp, where users can write reviews of their shopping experiences, but no real visual way to find out what’s inside stores in the area quickly. (Talk about finding a perfect niche in need of some help).

Other team members include Programmer Ben Wong and Designer Loc Ngo (co-founders of Startuply), and Programmer Steve Zu (formerly of social gaming company Lolapps).

The Boutique Perspective

To get the boutique perspective, I took a quick trip to meet with Marissa Olson, Owner of Chloe Rose, a women’s clothing boutique on Union Street.

Olson, in no way new to fashion, or online marketing, said what first drew her to using the app for her store was that she was approached about it.

She finds that to keep her store running smoothly and market online, she does what every boutique owner should do- she has a checklist of promotional things she does. She updates Facebook and Twitter at least once a day if possible and ShopNear.Me when new items arrive in the store.

ShopNear.Me really offers a “store front” to boutiques. With the pretty pictures and thoughtful search options, I’m excited to watch this app take off.

 

The Story of Snapette, an iOS Fashion App

Posted on by Ashley Laurel

I can’t tell you the number of times when I’ve been out and about and seen an amazing shoe that I took a picture of to text to my mom or one of my girl friends. In the end, these pictures would either end up saved on my phone or eventually deleted. But now I am able to save all photos to one place, Snapette, where other fashion fans will be able to enjoy my finds and I am able to see theirs too.

Last Friday, I sat down with Sarah Paiji, a co-founder of Snapette, and she told me the story of how this cool new fashion app came to be.

The Story

Sarah Paiji, originally from a suburb of LA, found herself on the East Coast for the past 8 years, including time in school at Harvard and working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co and Berkshire Partners. Most recently before Snapette, Paiji was studying at Harvard Business School. It was through an HBS alumni event where she met Jinhee Kim, an HBS alum more than two decades her senior, and more importantly, a woman with a very big idea.

Source: Snapette.com

According to Paiji, the two had a short meeting over coffee, after meeting at a Harvard alumni event. Soon after, Kim invited Paiji to spend her January 2011 term with the Kim family in London… to launch a company. Snapette.

With “no dominant social app yet” in fashion, and mobile being a space with such great growth potential, Paiji decided this was a chance too good to pass up.

After the two recruited a technical person to join their team (and for a month in London), the real work began.

Luckily, a tweet Paiji made about their new app was found by Dave McClure of 500 Startups, a startup incubator located in Mountain View, and soon McClure was inviting the Snapette team to relocate to California and work from the 500 Startups office space.

Just yesterday, 500 Startups hosted its second ever Demo Days, a place for its entrepreneurs to present their ideas to investors and press. The Snapette team presented, along with more than 20 other startups, as the culmination of their 3 month period in the 500 Startups accelerated program.

Think about it, within 8 months, Snapette went from an idea, to a company, and to a company that publications like Forbes and VentureBeat are now covering. That is pretty inspiring.

The App

Paiji describes the app as this: like Milo for fashion.

Source: The Fashionable Bambino

Snapette lets users upload an unlimited amount of content to the app (available on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and browse other users’ finds as well. For now, users can see shoes and bags that others have uploaded from around the world, and content uploaded by nearby stores. Users are able to search by brand, store, description, or “New”, “Near”, and “Hot” ratings of products.

And of course, there is further social integration with sites like Facebook.

Right now the Snapette team is focusing its efforts on working with boutiques in New York, LA, San Francisco, and London, including San Francisco-based boutiques like Heidi Says and Gimme Shoes.

Why stop with shoes and bags? Well for now, the Snapette team decided to just start with those products because “women are passionate about them”, according to Paiji.

Within 6 months, Paiji hopes to see the team add more features to Snapette and figure out whether to decide to focus more on fashion or the social experience.

*Note: A big thank you to Hong Quan of 500 Startups for the introduction.

A visit to de Young’s exhibit, Balenciaga and Spain

Posted on by Ashley Laurel

On Saturday I spent a very rainy morning trekking over to de Young for a dose of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s haute couture work and I wasn’t disappointed (only about the fact that I missed Anna Wintour by mere hours). Check out pictures from the opening night on Vogue.com.

Image credit: Vogue.com

Balenciaga, dubbed “Fashion’s Picasso” by Cecil Beaton, has been known for such feats as getting women to stray away from wearing Dior’s new look (which popularized the hourglass shape) in the 1950s. Instead, Balenciaga created dresses with broader shoulders and less of a defined waist. Also during this era, he created voluminous jackets (like his 1957 cocoon coat) and skirts (specifically the balloon skirt, a style that became popular again just a few years back).

Image credit: StyleBistro.com

The Balenciaga exhibit clearly captured his work, showing a wide range of garments influenced by the likes of bull fighting, flamenco dancers, religion, and quite generally, all things Spain. Bold shapes and color combinations definitely made for an exciting roundup of looks. Of the 120 pieces on exhibit, the ones I liked the most were the flamenco inspired dresses. Don’t they just make you want to dance?

Image credits: Vogue.com and Grant K. Gibson

After the exhibit I popped into the cafe for lunch and enjoyed the Herb Roasted Wild Escolar with patatas bravas (basically, this means I had an amazing dish of fish over potatoes).

The exhibit, curated by Vogue’s Hamish Bowles, runs through July 4, 2011. Let me know your thoughts after you visit!