No one is ignorant to the instance when you stand in front of your wardrobe and have clothes tumbling out from it, yet you wonder "what do I wear?" Style for hire, a new website launched only yesterday, comes as a blessing in disguise in such matters.
The website lets you avail yourself of the services of those masterful magicians previously accessible only to Hollywood royalty and reality-TV stars: fashion stylists.
Style for Hire is the work of Stacy London and veteran entrepreneur Cindy McLaughlin. The website aims at enabling regular folks to identify and hire stylists who will help you purge your closet of items that just don't work, figure out new looks that flatter your frame and figure, and go on a personal shopping trek to help you fill in the gaps in your wardrobe.
The idea for the site came up several years ago when CEO McLaughlin was preparing to re-enter the workforce after a childbearing hiatus and despaired that she'd be able to produce any work-appropriate looks from her mommy-clothes-filled wardrobe. London, a longtime friend from the New York fashion industry, came to her rescue, working her What Not to Wear magic on McLaughlin's closet, plucking through the garments and assembling a range of inspired outfits.
The two soft-launched the company in Washington, D.C. in 2010 (where McLaughlin lived while her husband Andrew served as President Obama's deputy chief technology officer) and used that market as a testing ground to refine the idea.
"Style is teachable," London tells Fast Company. Her own approach involves examining the geometry of an individual's body and selecting cuts and styles that play up the assets and minimize the problem areas. "A lot of people think this is about instinct, and you have to have some taste level," she says. "But we believe very much in the science of styling."
About 130 stylists are on Style for Hire's roster today, and the company plans to add more as applicants get vetted and trained. McLaughlin says she expects to have 400 stylists in the network by the end of this year and over 2,000 by the end of 2014.
The services aren't cheap--rates range from $65 to $300 an hour. But London and McClaughlin believe clients will more than make that money back by learning how to choose garments they love to wear and eschewing ones that look great on the mannequin but end up languishing at the back of the closet.
"Learning how to dress yourself is not something that's taught anymore," McLaughlin says. "Knowing what fit is, knowing what colors are flattering--it's a lost art for many people."
