Imagine you're an East Coaster, a New Yorker as such, and you're invited to a wedding in LA. And you ask yourself: what do I wear. I mean, you don't want to stick out. Not in a bad way anyway.
Unfortunately, of the soon to be married couple, you're closest to the groom, so you're not getting any help there. "Wear a dress" he says. Thank you very much. So you Google it: California Wedding Guests. But you're not really getting anything worth while. Then you go to Flickr, and you search for LA Wedding, but it's mostly photos of the bride and groom. And you ask around, but nobody knows.
So eventually, you and up wearing... well... black. Naturally. And you're standing there, in the all-the-friends-please-gather-around photo, sticking out like a funeral director in... well... a wedding. All in black with black peep toes pumps amongst 12 blonds in spaghetti strap knee high light colored dresses and silver stiletto sandals, and you feel a little out of place. You, who are considered such a well dresser amongst your friends, a trendsetter even, got it all wrong.
So a few months later, you have a convention you have to attend. Let's say you're a web designer, and it's the www.web2expo.com in NYC (you wouldn't risk going to the one in San Francisco, not after your last West Coast wardrobe fail). But you've never attended a convention before. And you ask yourself, what do I wear.
The What to Wear question is a tough one, and there's no easy answer to it. But I do have two suggestions. On the second suggestion I'll tell you in Part 2 of What to Wear. The first I call:
Sharing is Caring
This suggestion won't give you a fast answer, but it might help us all in the future. I suggest creating what I call The Universal Dress Code Dictionary (and if you want to be the developer who creates this app for Sense of Fashion please contact me). This means we all upload to the web, which ever photo sharing service we're using, photos from various events we've attended, and tag these photos, first with the tag UDCD (Universal Dress Code Dictionary) and then with as many tags possible indicating place, time and type of event (for example: Wedding, LA, September, 2009, Guest, or Web2.0 expo, Convention, Web, NYC, 2009, November). Then we'll all know what to wear, or at least, what others will probably be wearing.
And for now, here are a few photos of well dressed people from the Web2.0 Expo. I'll just say most attendants were a lot more casual than this, but these people stood out in a good way. And as for the speakers, the Best Dressed Prize goes to the gorgeous Caterina Fake of Hunch and Flickr.
Kaitline Pike, Community & Marketing Manager for web2.0 EXPO
Mark Dijksman, CEO, www.nvolve.com
Libby Issendorf, of www.flintcom.com
Ariel Waldman, Digital Anthropoligist, http://arielwaldman.com/
