A Farewell to Style.com

Goodbye, style.com

If you type in style.com, you'll already be redirected to the Vogue Runway website. The end of an era is officially here: style.com is no more.

Of course, the website will be relaunching next year, but it's going to be another dumb e-commerce site. It just isn't the same. Meanwhile, Vogue Runway will be the new home of runway coverage, videos, and photos. I'll let you know how that goes next week once NYFW begins, but for now I'm a bit sad. I've spent the last two weeks in a sorority bubble, consumed by hair flips and color schemes, so I didn't even know that this morning when I went to check on style.com like I do every morning, it would be gone. Pour one out for the now-deceased runway fashion website, destroyed by the evils of internet capitalism.

Style.com is how I became a knowledgeable member of the fashion world. I devoured runway coverage, scoured the archives for past season looks, read up on the It models and the experimental designers. I loved Tommy Ton's inventive snaps of street style looks from outside the fashion shows. I've never sat front row at a fashion show, never even been to Fashion Week, and yet I felt like I was right there with the insiders thanks to style.com's almost-instantaneous coverage.

I know that Vogue Runway will mostly be a continuation of the qualities I came to know and love with style.com, but there is one part that makes me truly sad: Tim Blanks' reviews will not be there anymore. More than any other famous individual in the fashion world, Tim Blanks is the one who has inspired me to become a fashion writer and combine my loves for beautiful clothing and writing. The way he talks about fashion is so unlike anything else I've ever read, and it truly is inspiring. He sees runway shows as expressions of creativity and complex themes, juxtapositions of different ideas and themes all culminating in one awesome experience. It is because of Tim Blanks that I went into Art History, still with the idea that I would continue on into the world of fashion. The way he connects Prada dresses to German abstract expressionism in the 1930s, or Christopher Kane collections to obscure art films, has made me realize that fashion is just another art form and that it is related to all sorts of culture. The way we write about art and the way we write about fashion are actually quite similar, and it is thanks to Tim Blanks that I have had this epiphany.

Tim Blanks will now be writing for the Business of Fashion, and I'm thankful that he will still be active in the fashion world because I seriously live for his reviews, but I'm still sad that the style.com that made me feel connected to the seemingly exclusive world of fashion is gone. It's a brave new world. Here's hoping it's a good one.

What do you think about the "death" of style.com? Will you be using the new Vogue Runway?