Need Fashion Help? Post a Picture

What woman doesn’t hate this scenario: you’re in the dressing room of a store, trying on a skirt, when you look in the mirror and experience a few minutes confusion over whether the skirt looks good and worth the price you’d pay for it. That’s when you wish you’d come to the mall with your so-honest-it-hurts best girlfriend rather than your say-anything-to-stay-in-her-good-graces fiance, who also secretly wishes he were home watching the baseball game with a bottle of beer in his hand. What to do?

Luckily, millions of women have experienced similar dilemmas. We recently thanked the fashion gods for having a few entrepreneurial women set up two style-saving websites. We included Fashism in our Fashion Social Site Toolbox, and new entrant Go Try It On also picks up where magazine editorials leave off: in reader’s closets. Users post pictures on the website, then wait for comments to come in. Both websites allow comments and keep track of positive and negative reactions. Questions by posters range from the basic (is this too boxy?) to the more complicated (is this professional?) areas of fashion that leave many stumped on a day to day basis.

The sites can help users avoid being repeat fashion blunderers, and even comes in handy for the most important day in many women’s lives: their wedding day. One user took to Fashism after doing some wedding dress shopping, and found that a dress she’d been unsure about was not meant to be. She decided to continue shopping and ended up finding the “one”.

Both sites are currently developing iPhone applications so that you don’t have to wait to get on a computer or use the mobile web. It’s like shopping with a opinionated friend in your pocket. Genius idea? We think so. {New York Times}