Before Pinterest Mood Boards And TikTok “-Cores,” There Was Polyvore

Words: Cassidy Sollazzo

I often say I grew up on Tumblr. Which I did, from ages 12 to 17. But my true internet education began a few years earlier, on a beautiful little webpage called Polyvore. My babysitter, who I considered the Arbiter of Cool, showed me the site from the desktop computer in her family’s quintessentially post-market-crash basement. It became my first legitimate online social space outside of Club Penguin, Webkinz, and my brand-spanking-new AOL account. 

I was transfixed by the endless stream of clothing (my first foray outside of Limited Too and Abercrombie Kids), beauty products (I’d never worn makeup outside of dance recitals), accessories (thus began my Prada sunglasses obsession), and celebrities (‘Famous people exist outside of the Disney Channel?’). My babysitter gave me a crash course on making “Sets” (a fancy word for digital collages), and I took off running, largely left to fend for myself and immediately emailing the link to every fellow ten-year-old in my address book.

This August marks 20 years since the prototype for Polyvore was developed. A brief history lesson: Polyvore functioned as an online database and social platform that allowed users access to the site’s image catalog (and their own imports) to create Sets, not unlike a blank Google slide. Its original purpose was to build and visualise outfits, but Sets soon became art forms of their own; users created mosaics and developed visual narratives, using celebrities (like Alexa Chung), places (like Amsterdam), or individual items (like a Chloe Paddington shoulder bag) as centrepieces to build Sets around, putting exacting care into the 50 items they were limited to per collage.  

But commerce was at the core; every item on Polyvore was linked to its origin site - most often to online retailers like Nordstrom or Macy’s, or directly to the brands themselves - and users could click through and directly purchase the things they put in their Sets. This created a pretty natural and symbiotic relationship between the platform and the brands on it, which is in part what led to Polyvore’s eventual profitability in 2011. A year prior, The New Yorker profiled Polyvore’s creators, executives, and some top users, positioning it as a first-of-its-kind trendsetting forum with an almost anti-establishment lean. Jess Lee, then a Senior Vice President of product at Polyvore, said the site’s mission was “to democratise fashion.” 
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“None have been able to recreate the perfect storm that lived on Polyvore dot com, which may be why I've developed such a penchant for IRL collage in adulthood.”

Which it did, but to most users, especially those in the under-25 demo, Polyvore was a low-stakes way to experiment with who they might become, using clothes and objects to build elaborate visual self-portraits or dream scenarios. An outlet for aestheticising ourselves in ways we couldn’t realistically accomplish in our day-to-days. It fostered creativity and community, with a blog, the ability to make groups with other users, and even a public advice forum also embedded into the platform. 

I, notoriously sisterless, posted on said forum to ask what to wear to the first day of middle school. Dozens of older Polyvore sisters offered their ideas and words of encouragement, and I walked into sixth grade with a little more pep in my step because of it. Polyvore was as much of a social platform as something like Tumblr, users leading with a similar photoless identity but existing via Set captions, comments, and group posts. It was more MySpace than Twitter, peak k3wL luvU2:* times. 

A few years ago, someone on Reddit asked people to describe what it was like being on Polyvore. u/catfrend shared: “It was the first big, free website that allowed people to make not just moodboards, but digital collages. Fashion was definitely the focus, but there was [sic] also people who made art… it was easy to see other people's creations, have them see your own collages/posts, and interact with them. It had a lot of users, but didn't feel like a big anonymous site full of strangers.”

Polyvore and its Sets anticipated Pinterest moodboards, TikTok cores, Instagram photo dumps, and the increasingly specific aesthetics through which we communicate identity online today. It helped develop a visual language that’s shaped all of today’s online spaces. Like fangirls, who used Polyvore to create #imagines and visual fan fiction, then cross-posting them onto Tumblr or Twitter. They predated the full-out fan edit videos that eventually rose to popularity on Vine and now exist on TikTok, and many of the original Sets themselves have now turned into memes or insider lore within the communities. 

The site also had a feature called Zeitgeist, which set “trends of the week,” listing out top-used brands, celebs, items, or set templates. It was like a platform-wide FYP dictated by the users themselves, built out of endless rabbit holes that made it a more interactive way to engage with and create your own personal microtrends rather than being fed them. 

It was a different level than a mood board - where you could actually manipulate the images and put what would now be considered a “Pin” into one space and arrange them how you want, rather than just having them listed out in a grid for you. You, as a user, were an active participant in building the aesthetic into something that was more than just a list of items. 

Polyvore was so early-internet that no platform today has been able to fully replace the sense of creativity and possibility it offered. The site itself was also relatively unregulated. There were brand sponsorships, but it was mostly user-led. It wasn’t just for the fashionista; there was little to no algorithm. The platform was a platform and not its own conscious entity. It was a stage for the users. Commenting on Reddit, u/stardustnf said, “I started out using it to create fashion sets, but it very quickly became an artistic outlet for me. Often focused on fashion, but also including art, music, and other types of creativity. No other app that I've used even remotely comes close to the all-encompassing site that was Polyvore.” 

In 2018, the multi-brand retailer and ecomm site SSENSE bought the assets to Polyvore and essentially shut the website down, every link redirecting to the SSENSE site and only living in the occasional Wayback Machine snapshot. The only thing that lives on untarnished is their Instagram. Many apps and websites have come along, both during and since Polyvore’s reign, trying to emulate the original’s air of boundless creativity (ahem, Fits, ShopLook, Combyne). Yet none have been able to recreate the perfect storm that lived on Polyvore dot com, which may be why I've developed such a penchant for IRL collage in adulthood.