Polyvore is that amazing website that lets you create collages in a snap. No need to fuss with Photoshop, Polyvore allows you to isolate objects on a picture, paste pictures above each others, rearrange their order, collect pictures from any websites in a click of a button and search among a gazillions of pictures already saved by others (and organized by colors, tags, etc.). It’s like scrap booking except, you know… better.

Because when I say “picture”, what I really mean is “product”. Yeah. Stuff you’d buy. Boots. Shirts. Dresses. Glasses. All for your taking.

How does it work?

Once you set up an account, you need to start collecting items that you can then use in your collages. There’s two ways to do that:

• doing a research in the website choosing either “products” (products added by merchants) or “items” (combination of products and items added by users)… it’s my experience than you get much more choice with “items” than “products” (there’s also a lot of junk but hey… it’s part of the fun). From there start the endless wandering throughout the site, from one item to one set (that’s how they call the collages) to another item to the entire portfolio of an amazing shop, etc.
• you can also save items from mostly any website you visit by placing the “Clip to Polyvore” clipper in your bookmark bar. Every time you see something you want, you click “Clip to Polyvore”, follow the instruction, and the item will then magically appear in your library.

Then, all you have to do is start creating sets :) I keep most of mine as drafts, because I like tweaking them and I have no big interest in the social aspect of the site, but you can publish your sets if you want, comment on sets created by others, and be part of the pretty active Polyvore community.

Polyvore and style refining

I recently bought Danielle Laporte and Carrie McCarthy’s book Style Statement: Live by Your Own Design. The purpose of the book is to help you define your style, and ultimately distill the essence of your style in a two words “style statement”. While I loved the concept, I was (and still am) utterly incapable of reducing my sense of style to 2 words that would encompass everything. The closer I came was 3 words: Gamine Edgy Nerd. And it doesn’t follow at all the 80/20 style statement principle proposed by Danielle and Carrie… It’s just a description. (But the statements produced with the formula sound so generic to me!)

Maybe I failed the exercise, maybe it just wasn’t for me. As much as I like words and want to make a living by aligning them in interesting prose, when it comes to style the thing I’m craving for is visual representation. So I undertook the task of putting together a set to represent an ideal representation of my personal style. I tweaked it for several weeks (well… not full time, you know) before I was really satisfied with the result.

This visual reminder helps me make better decisions when I shop. Too often, I would buy things that I liked, but in the end rarely used because it just wasn’t me and it wasn’t coherent with my style. Now, I just ask myself if the item would belong in my dream board, and I immediately know if it would be a good or a bad purchase.

It even helped me design my blog’s layout :)

Polyvore and the Law of Attraction

Beside the obvious fun of putting together dream outfits and wardrobes, Polyvore is an amazing tool to make vision boards. I successfully used it to make collages of images of things I’m reaching for (not necessarily things, it can be concepts or ideas). I would then take a screenshot of my collage in draft format (because it appears bigger), then I’d remove all of the junk (sidebars, etc.) from the picture, save the remaining collage, and upload it as a desktop background.

Does it work? Well yeah! I started doing EFT watching at my vision board with pictures of travels, fitness, whole foods (and other things I won’t admit in public). A few months later, I’m back from San Francisco (travel: check!), and I’m more motivated than ever to take care of myself (fitness: check!) and eat like a grown up (whole foods: check!). It’s not that much that the vision board magically brought all these things into my life… it simply helped make them a part of my inner landscape so that they become unavoidable after some time.

And on a slightly less esoteric level… there was this awesome leather jacket by Rick Owen that held a recurring role in many of my boards. Well, I found a very decent copy recently at Victoria’s Secret at a fraction of the price (I’d link to it, but it’s already sold out). I fell in love with it immediately, without even remembering I had been obsessed with a similar one recently. It’s only when I browsed back in my Polyvore boards that I clicked: “OMG! Those are so alike!” Thanks, Universe, for sending an affordable option my way!