Top Google Plus Fashion Communities

Welcome to the Top Google Plus Fashion Community Guide. The companion page in this section lists the fashion communities on Google+ as a directory; this page is the shortlist - the leading communities, presented with a badge for each: an image and brief information about the community, so a reader could see at a glance what each group was about before joining it.

Google announced on October 8, 2018 that it planned to shut down Google+, and the consumer service closed on April 2, 2019. The communities and their badges are gone; the badge code itself had stopped working even before the shutdown and was removed at the time. What follows is the record of the shortlist and of how the communities on it were run.

The Shortlist

The top communities were: 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. No matter what a reader was into, there were people on Google+ who shared the interest; for a fashion reader, this list cut out most of the research.

The subjects split naturally into kinds: making fashion (Designers, Fashion Designers), selling it (Fashion Brand, Fashion Boutiques, Fashion Boutique), wearing and showing it (Stylists, Shoes, Beauty, Red Carpet, Celebrity Spotting), and reading about it (Fashion Blog, Fashion News, Fashion Photography, Fashion Trends, Fashion Week). A shortlist organized that way helped a new member find their room quickly.

Community Badges

Each community on the shortlist was presented with a badge: an image and brief information about the community, rendered by Google's badge code on this page. Badges were the standard way to display a Google+ community on another website - a small, recognizable card that named the group, showed its picture and invited a click through to it.

The badge code stopped working before the service itself closed, and the badges were removed from the page at that point; the community names and subjects were kept. It is a small example of how a service winds down in pieces - first the extras stop working, then the accounts and pages themselves are shut down.

Posting on Topic

Anyone planning to use one of these communities was asked to keep the conversations on topic. Communities were divided into categories, and members were expected to follow the rules carefully and post only topics relevant to the discussion area they were posting in. Most communities allowed the posting of website links, fashion photos and videos, provided they belonged in the category chosen.

The rule was practical rather than fussy. A community's value was its focus: members joined a shoe community to talk about shoes, and off-topic posting spent the attention everyone had brought for the subject. On-topic posting, in the right category, is what made public communities around a subject worth joining in the first place.

Finding Your People

The promise behind the shortlist was simple: join the conversation, and you would be learning new things and making friends in no time. Public communities gathered strangers around a subject they were passionate about, and fashion - a subject people follow for pleasure as much as for work - filled its communities with exactly that kind of member.

That is why a curated guide helped. Google+ held communities for every subject anyone could name, and finding the fashion ones meant searching through the whole network. A shortlist kept by a fashion guide, limited to communities its own readers would care about, saved the search and started the reader at the right doors.

The Shortlist Today

Google announced the Google+ shutdown on October 8, 2018; the end was first expected at the end of August 2019, and the consumer service closed on April 2, 2019. Accounts, pages and communities were shut down and consumer content was deleted, so none of the communities on this shortlist can be visited or joined today, and there is no badge left to follow.

The guide's fashion blog asked at the time whether Google was evil for closing the service; that post is kept in the references below. The full community directory, with the wider list of fashion communities, is on the companion page linked at the top of this page, and the fashion subjects themselves continue through the Apparel Search routes below.