Last week, the WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit Conference took place in New York city. One of the speakers was Jack Nickell, the founder and chief strategy officer of ‘crowdsourced’ fashion brand Threadless. During the conference, he talked about the importance of the online community on their website.

Nickell talked about how Threadless is about celebrating their community’s work and that this should be reflected across the brand. According to PSFK, he said that “the reason they haven’t partnered with large retailers is that they can’t tell the story behind the tees in the same way they can on their own site”.

Nickell also stated that user voting was vital because of the impact it has on building the community. He said: “It is more valuable to have a user score a design than have them buy a tee.”

Read about it here!

Shoppers visiting Macy’s Herald Square store in New York through November of this year are in for a surprise! Macy’s and LBi have re-invented the dressing room experience by using augmented reality, app technology and social media.

The dressing booths are equipped with a 72-inch multi-touch mirror and an iPad. The customer selects clothing from the iPad application and transfers the items on their body’s image on the mirror. And there’s more! While shopping, customers can easily upload photos of themselves in their new outfits to social networking sites (using e-mails or SMS). This allows them to get live feedback from their friends with a flick of the wrist.

Want to know more? Read the full article at http://www.psfk.com/2010/10/macys-rethinks-the-fitting-room-experience.html

Clothing  is seen as an expression of one’s identity or as a symbol of the social group/culture one is belonging to, so why not wearing a smart, flex-image fabric that displays pieces of ones social network directly on clothes.

The OSMO Custom Social Network Wearable allows participants to customize clothing with smart, flex-image fabric.

The OSMO wearable is not only a wearable piece of your personal voice but it’s also connected, networked and alive. It communicates with your iPhone applications, detects “friends” from your Loopt™ profile and picks up and displays images from other participants in close proximity.

Source: Talk2myShirt, Creating Space

A few weeks ago there was quite some uproar on the change in the Terms of Services from Facebook.

Amanda French compares the TOS of Facebook with the one of MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Linkedin seems to have quite a strong Terms of Service-statement: in fact, when you upload something (photos, ideas, your profile,…) you grant them the “right [...] to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.”

Twitter seems to have the most “user-friendly” TOS:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

If you are still in doubt whether you can trust “those social media”-sites, then maybe it’s a good idea to consider open source social networking.

Inshoshi calls itself a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product! Inshoshi tries to build the code to be able to “install” and further develop your own social networking site.

LovedByLess is a similar project and seems to be finished already. Both seem to be good tools to work third party-independent.

This week I came across two great examples that perfectly match with the title of this blog: Social Textiles! They combine social media with clothes; more in particular with T-shirts!

Firstly there is the Facebook application, Status king which makes it possible to order T-shirts with  some basic Facebook information about yourself printed on: more in particular your Facebook status, user picture and how long ago you’ve updated your status. So if you want to let  know “what are you doing right now?” in a non-digital way!

But if you say: I’m not so a Facebook-fan. I’m more into Twitter, than I have some very good news for you! Similar to the Facebook application there is a service, called TWitoShirt which displays your tweets on a shirt, exactly as it appears on the web; so not only the message is printed, but also the username, user picture and the time that has elapsed. An additional feature is that you can also customize the size and colours.

Source: Mashable, Status king, TWitoShirt

Via Robin Hamman, blogging at Cybersoc, I found a great presentation on the use of Twitter called “How Twitter changed my life” (by Minxuan Lee).

Most interesting elements of the presentation are:

* The 5 stages of Twitter acceptance (Denial – Presence – Dumping – Conversing – Microblogging)

* The fact that it’s not about the question “What are you doing?”, but about “What has your attention?”

* About the open API: “For every pain you face, there is a Twitter app. Otherwise, create it!”

via: Cybersoc