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

Kobi Levi is an Israeli designer who specializes in unusual footwear that blurs the line between fashion and art. On his weblog you can find the most extravagant footwear designs, ranging from sling-shot shoes to banana slippers. “The shoe is my canvas”, Levi claims on his weblog. “The piece is a wearable sculpture. It is “alive” with/out the foot/body.” Levi gets his inspiration out of the “shoe-world” and gives the footwear an extreme make-over. All of Levi’s shoes are hand-made in his studio and the challenging technical development is the key to bring the designs to life in the best possible way way.

Check out the remarkable footwear of Kobi Levi here.

Have you always wanted to make your own pair of shoes? I know I have!!

And it is possible. In East London, I CAN make Shoes - an initiative of Australian shoe designer Amanda Luisa – organises 3-day workshops for amateurs, like me, that dream of making their own pair of killer shoes and take them back home afterwards.

Source: I CAN make shoes

Some years ago, Fabrican created an instant, sprayable, non-woven fabric and was developed further through a collaboration between Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, London (UK). When spraying the liquid onto your body, the liquid transforms into fabric. Each spray can sends thousands of cotton fibers splattering against your skin. The fibers then bend together and form a garment that peels away when you undress (so washing your clothes is no longer needed). Since the fibres are delivered in a diffused form, other elements, like perfumes, pigments or treatments, can be easily added.

Source: NextNature ; We make money not art

For his project Intimacy, Dutch artists Daan Roosegaarde created a dress made of flexible e-foils which can be either opaque or transparent depending on the currents flowing through them. Intimacy was developed by Studio Roosegaarde, V2_Lab and fashion designer Maartje Dijkstra

The Intimacy dress takes our notion personal space to a next level: the closer someone approaches, the more transparent the dress becomes. As such, the garment becomes a sort of second skin that allows the body to become an ‘interface’.

If you want to learn more, check out the interview with Daan Roosegaarde

Source: NextNature, V2, Fashioning Technology