Fashion Apps

A fashion app is simply an application — software downloaded to a mobile device — whose subject is fashion. That short definition covers a wide field: apps for shopping, apps for styling and wardrobe planning, apps for following brands and sales, and apps that help designers sketch and develop ideas. The phone has become a fitting room, a shop window and a sketchbook at once, and fashion apps are how the industry moved into it.

Android, iPhone and the App Stores

On Android, apps are distributed through Google Play, which carries over a million apps and games across phones, tablets, TVs and the web; fashion searches there surface shopping apps from retailers, styling tools and design games side by side. An iPhone app is an application developed for Apple's iPhone or iPod Touch, typically by a company other than Apple, that lets the device perform a specific task the user wants. In practice most serious fashion apps launch on both platforms, because retailers and services cannot afford to ignore either half of the market.

Discovery is the hard part. Store search rewards downloads and ratings rather than quality, so a useful approach is to search by task — “fashion design apps”, “wardrobe planner”, “price comparison” — rather than by the word fashion alone. The terminology pages linked below separate fashion apps from desktop fashion apps, a distinction that matters for professional tools: design and product-lifecycle software still lives mainly on desktop systems, while consumer fashion software is overwhelmingly mobile.

What Fashion Apps Actually Do

Shopping apps are the largest group: retailer apps, marketplace apps and price-alert tools that turn a phone into a store. Styling apps form the second group — outfit planners, virtual wardrobes and colour-matching tools. A third group serves the trade rather than the shopper: trend forecasting, fabric libraries, sizing tools and design apps that let a designer sketch a garment, apply fabrics to it and share the result. The fashion design apps article linked below looks at that creative end of the market.

For the industry, apps also changed marketing. A brand's app is a direct channel that no search engine or social feed can throttle, with push notifications for drops and sales — one reason so many retailers push shoppers from the mobile web into an app. For shoppers, the judgement is simpler: an app earns its place on the phone if it does something the website cannot, such as barcode scanning in store, fit recommendations from past purchases, or a wardrobe photographed and searchable.