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Top 5 Fashion Apps to Change Up Your Style this Fashion Week

By Serena Solomon | September 5, 2013 6:30am
 There are plenty of fashion smartphone apps to up your style for fashion week.
Apps Help You Stay Stylish for Fashion Week
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NEW YORK CITY — Fashion forward and tech savvy go hand-in-hand at New York Fashion Week.

While photo and video sharing apps like Instagram and Vine will keep you plugged in to the play-by-play action throughout the week, there are also smartphone and web apps that can enhance your style, sort your wardrobe based on the weather, or help you find the right fit online.

There's even an app to help you with hard-to-pronounce designer names.

"Fashion was always more of this creative industry, yet we are able to use this technology to our advantage," said stylist Dawn Del Russo, who uses numerous fashion apps daily to help with clients and for her own style.

"I think people in our industry are realizing how essential it is to us," she said.

Here are five of the best apps for Fashion Week and beyond:

Pose

Pose enabled its two million plus members to post photos of their outfits, curating a database of what to wear and how to wear it from fashion bloggers and celebrity trend-setters to everyday folks.

Not only can users follow their friends and personal style icons on Pose, the app allows you to tag clothing so other users will know the brand, color or fabric, all the better to incorporate the look into their own style.

Users also categorize their outfits into styles such as preppy or glamorous, which is then fed to other users who are interested in those looks.

"It is real world, real girls; what they are wearing on the street, wearing for the day," said app user Stephanie Unter, who has been working as a stylist in New York since 1993.

Speak Chic

If you find yourself stumbling over names like Givenchy (hint: it's not pronounced Ga-vin-chee) or you trip over shoe designer Giuseppe Zanotti (Jew-sep-pe Zah-not-tee), the Speak Chic app will help you talk fluent 'fashion'.

The platform has the audio pronunciation and the phonetic spelling of more than 300 brands, designers and fashion's other tricky phrases, according to the Speak Chic website.

The app also gives you impressive trivia on some of the biggest fashion houses so you can confidently converse with any fashionista.

Cloth

This app helps you to catalog your wardrobe and your outfits for different occasions while linking everything to the weather.

"Looking through the pictures, you can remember you do have that great dress in the back of your wardrobe," said Jennifer Wright, a style editor at The Observer. She said its creator Seth Porges, who is also a journalist and friend of Wright, first introduced her to the app.

On Cloth, snap a photo of your daily outfit, add a brief description and then tag it to categories such as everyday, evening or vacation. When you want to remember what you wore for an event or get inspiration from your previous outfits, you can access it easily.

"You can comment on what you liked or didn't like about the outfit," said Wright, giving the example of dress that becomes uncomfortable after eating dinner. "Those are the things you often forget as soon as you take something off."

The app also automatically tags the outfit for weather on the day you wore it, so if you need inspiration for a rainy day, check the outfits in your rainy day catalog.

Fitting Room Social

In the battle against ordering ill-fitting clothing online, Fitting Room Social finds safety in numbers.

The women-only iPhone and web app, which launched in June and already has several hundred users, gives a virtual platform for users to mingle with other online shoppers, comparing photos and notes on the fit of brands and sizing.

"Rather then relying on size charts or six foot tall models, you actually get the opinions of and you see photos of women who look like you," said Bradley Liff, 32, the founder and CEO of Fitting Room Social.

Women can opt to upload their measurements to the app and it will connect them with other women who have similar measurements. You can then view their comments, feedback and even fitting room photos to determine how snugly a piece of clothing will fit.  

The app can also take user-generated reviews and recommend what brands are best suited to your body type, according to Liff.

Pop of Color from Shop BAZAAR

Fancy a dress of taxicab yellow or pants in sidewalk grey? With the Pop of Color app from Harper's BAZAAR, you can hover your iPhone over any color and it will curate the current season’s top picks from the magazine’s editors.

"So many clients have favorite colors, even myself I have colors that I wear more often," said stylist Dawn del Russo, who says she often uses Pop of Color.

"If you see a color anywhere, it will find bags, shoes and clothes all in a similar shade," she added.