So Long, Style.com

For all the parental nightmares it once conjured of dark rooms and pale loners and never-ending games of Bubble Trouble, the World Wide Web has facilitated communities so good they rival even IRL crowds.

But long before I found Facebook or turned to Twitter or discovered the chat room that is this website, no URL gave me so profound a sense of belonging as Style.com.

When I came across it, I was fifteen years old and desperate to master a new language. Like savvier women and John Waters before me, I had at last begun to understand the power that clothing could command — the way it could announce a person and define her and make her look older than her diminutive frame might lead unkind adults to assume. Given that I had outfitted myself in oversize souvenir shirts and loose leggings for the full decade before I awoke to such consciousness, the realization was a singular revelation. Now aware of what fashion could do, I was determined to memorize it. Which is just about when I smacked into Style.com.

That was how it felt to me then — like I had walked into something important and huge. The site drafted me into the only league I would ever join, introducing me to players and coaches and the rabid fans that cheered for them. I rooted for all of it.

When I interviewed for a deeply unglamorous internship at WWD a year later, I spoke in a newly acquired rhetoric — charting the course of Proenza Schouler, extolling the virtues of Alexander McQueen and slim silks and gabardine wool, wondering aloud about the evolution of Zac Posen. After it was over, I marveled at my own eloquence. I had become more than proficient. I was fluent. Good thing, too.

Because the hubris made it easier to stand on 42nd Street in the bitter cold and hand out newspapers to harried Fashion Week attendees for three years in a row. As soon as my shift was over, I was allowed to sneak into the back of any show I wanted and watch. This was what it was to be on the inside.

A professor I once knew well told me that you can love almost anything. But you can only like what you understand. It was never enough to worship this industry and these people and the stuff they made and sold. Outside of storefronts and advertorial pages and the contents of my own closet, I had to know it.

Earlier this week, Condé Nast announced that it would reinvent Style.com, transforming it into a global e-commerce platform and transferring the content that sustained so many of us for so many years to a new space that American Vogue will mastermind — voguerunway.com. While I hate to be too nostalgic in this age of present tense, I miss the site already.

But this is not an obituary.

It’s a question. When you first decided to look, where did you find your sartorial resources? Does the prospect of the new Style.com excite you? Does it make you nervous? Does the fact of this overhaul suggest the irrelevance of the critical review? Is it even possible for industry news — entangled as it is in the snare of advertising — to be objective on the web? Does this mean that we have ranked personal — and shop-able — style above the expert opinion? Click, click: Let’s talk about it.