Badges for the Fashion Industry Network Website

The badges at the Fashion Industry Network have been discontinued, and this page is no longer necessary in its working sense - it is kept as the record of the program. A badge was the network's outward sign: a small graphic a member could place on their own fashion website to show membership in the fashion industry's business network and to send their visitors toward it.

The request appeared across the network's pages in its working years: if you are a member of the fashion network and you have your own fashion website, please consider adding a fashion industry network badge on your site. Badges were how a young social network advertised itself in the era before share buttons - one member's website at a time.

What a Badge Did

A badge did three jobs at once. It told the member's own visitors that the person behind the site belonged to the industry's network. It linked those visitors onward, turning every member's website into a small recruiting post. And it knitted the network's membership into a visible web: a fashion site carrying the badge was declaring itself part of the same community as every other site that carried it.

That is why the discontinuation of the badges is worth a page of its own. When a network's badges stop being offered, it usually means the network has stopped growing outward - the phase the Fashion Industry Network reached before its closure was announced in June 2024, as its main page in this section records.

The Network Around the Badges

The Fashion Industry Network launched in July 2007; the launch was announced in this guide's news archive, in the article linked below. Members who took a badge also lived under the Fashion Network Rules and gathered in the network's groups - both linked at the top of this page - which between them set the terms of membership the badge displayed.

Readers interested in joining a business network relevant to fashion, style, textiles and clothing were directed to the Fashion Industry Network itself, described on its main page in this section. The badge was the invitation's smallest form: the network in one image, carried on someone else's page.

Badges belonged to a particular era of the web, when independent sites linked to one another by hand and a graphic on a sidebar was a real endorsement. A directory editor chose the badges a page carried; visitors followed them from site to site, mapping the industry's friendships as they went. The Fashion Industry Network badge asked to be one of those chosen marks, and the members who displayed it were, in effect, the network's distributed front door - which is why the end of the badge program reads, in hindsight, like the first page of the network's own closing chapter.