Fashion Gadgets
The directory of the Apparel Search fashion gadget family — the iGoogle gadget family, kept as a historical record.
Fashion gadgets were small, self-contained panels of fashion content that a reader could place on a personalized homepage or a webmaster could embed in a fashion website. Apparel Search built a family of them with the Google Gadgets API for iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage service: a gadget for fashion news and newspapers, one for fashion designers, one for clothing industry jobs, one for fashion search, and general Apparel Search and industry network editions. Each one pulled live feeds from Apparel Search websites, so the headlines and listings inside the panel stayed current without the host page ever being edited.
iGoogle was retired on November 1, 2013, and its mobile version had already closed on July 31, 2012. When the service ended, the gadgets stopped working and the embed code was withdrawn, so this directory no longer offers anything to install. The pages are kept as a historical record of how fashion content was syndicated in the personalized-homepage era — and as a map of the feed-driven services, such as the fashion RSS feeds and fashion widgets, that Apparel Search still maintains in other forms.
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The Fashion Gadgets
What a Gadget Was
A gadget, in the iGoogle sense, was a miniature web application: a block of content — headlines, photos, a search box, a list of job postings — packaged so it could live inside someone else's page. A reader added one to a personalized homepage with a click and arranged it beside weather, mail and news panels. A webmaster took the other route and pasted a short script into a blog sidebar or a directory page, and the gadget then updated itself from its feed every time the page loaded. For a fashion publisher, that was a genuinely new distribution channel: the content travelled to the reader's homepage instead of waiting for the reader to visit.
The Apparel Search Gadget Family
The collection listed above covers the main Apparel Search services of its day. The Apparel Search gadget gathered feeds from across the company's websites. The designer gadget followed important fashion designers with updated news and photos. The jobs gadget carried clothing industry job content in three sizes, up to a large 300 x 700 panel. The newspaper gadget streamed fashion news and blog posts, the search gadget put fashion search boxes on other people's pages, and the network gadget served the business community. An add-to-your-website page explained the cut-and-paste embedding process for webmasters.
Why the Section Is Still Here
The gadgets themselves are gone, but the needs they served are not: readers still want fashion headlines, designer news, job listings and search close at hand. Those services live on at their regular addresses — the fashion news pages, the employment section, the designer directory and the site search — and the links on this page lead to them. The gadget pages that follow document what each gadget did, what sizes it came in and where its content lives now, so an old bookmark or a mention on another website still lands on an explanation instead of a dead end.
Common Questions
What was an iGoogle gadget?
A gadget was a small self-contained content panel — headlines, photos, listings or a search box — that could be added to a personalized iGoogle homepage or embedded into another website with a short script, updating itself from a feed.
When did iGoogle close?
Google retired the mobile version of iGoogle on July 31, 2012 and the desktop service on November 1, 2013. The Apparel Search gadgets stopped working when the service ended, and their embed code was removed after that date.
Can I still add a fashion gadget to my website?
Not these gadgets — the platform they ran on no longer exists. The fashion widgets and fashion RSS feed pages linked from this directory cover the closest current equivalents for putting Apparel Search content on another site.