Google Plus Fashion Communities

Welcome to the Google Plus Fashion Community Directory. Where the Google+ Fashion pages in this section were for following, communities were for talking: a community was a named group on Google+ that members joined to post, discuss and share around one subject. This directory gathered the fashion relevant communities on Google+ in one place, so a reader could find the conversations that matched their interests.

Google announced on October 8, 2018 that it planned to shut down the Google+ service, and the consumer service closed on April 2, 2019. The communities below closed with it. The directory is kept here as the record of what existed - the community names, what members could do in them, and the features that made them work - while the same fashion subjects continue in the guide's own pages.

The Fashion Community Directory

The directory lists the communities by subject, and the list reads like a map of the industry's interests: Fashion, Fashion Blog, Fashionista World, Fashion Brand, Fashion Industry, Fashion Boutiques, Stylists, Shoes, Beauty, Fashion Photography, Fashion Trends, Fashion Designers, Fashion Week, Designers, Celebrity Spotting, Red Carpet, Fashion Boutique and Fashion News.

Most subjects earned one community; a few earned neighbors - a general Fashion community beside the narrower Fashion Brand and Fashion Boutique groups, for example - because a big open room and a small focused one serve different conversations. A reader could join one community or many, and each kept its own membership, its own posts and its own tone.

What Members Could Do There

From these communities you could post beautiful fashion photos and videos, plan events, and even have face-to-face discussions in Hangouts, Google's video conversation tool. You could also stay connected to your communities on the go from your mobile phone, reading and posting between other things rather than only at a desk.

Communities worked because the subject did the organizing. A photo posted to a photography community reached people who had chosen to look at fashion photography; a question in a designers' community reached designers. Keeping the conversations on topic was the standing request made of every member, and it is what kept a community worth visiting.

A Home Base for Shared Interests

Whether a Google Plus community was for your family, your book club or people around the world who share your interests, communities gave each member a home base to communicate with one another. That home base idea was the design at the center of the feature: a fixed address for a group, with its membership and its conversation history in one place.

For fashion, the home base mattered because the subject splinters into so many specialties. A stylist, a shoe collector and a fashion photographer all belong to the same industry but read different material; communities let each of them keep a room of their own while the directory above kept the rooms findable from one page.

Sparks, Hangouts, Circles and Streams

Four Google+ ideas ran through the community era and are worth recording with it. Fashion Sparks were the interest-based recommendations Google+ surfaced to a user. Fashion Hangouts were the face-to-face video discussions communities could hold. Fashion Circles were the groups a user built from the people and pages they followed.

Fashion Streams were the flowing lists of posts those circles produced - the thing a member actually read each day. Communities fed the streams: join a community and its posts joined your reading. The four ideas together were Google's answer to one question - how a very large network stays readable - and fashion readers used all of them.

The Communities After the Shutdown

The shutdown Google announced on October 8, 2018 was first expected to finish at the end of August 2019; the consumer service in fact closed on April 2, 2019, and its communities closed with it - memberships, posts and discussions deleted as part of the consumer shutdown. No community in the directory above can be joined today.

An example view of the leading communities was kept on the companion page in this section, the Top Google+ Fashion Communities page linked at the top. The guide's fashion blog also covered the closure as it approached; that post is in the references below. The subjects the communities served remain directory subjects on Apparel Search, through the routes at the bottom of this page.