The Lookbook page on PS has long been a hidden jewel. A lot of readers find it useful but others don’t know it’s there. I blame the way people (including me) use websites today, searching and asking before reading and browsing.
Well, the Lookbook is here, as well as under ‘Style’ in the menu, and it has had an update. You can now filter outfits by weather (winter, summer, rain, spring/autumn) and by formality. Given there are over 400 looks, you really need it now to get a sense of them.
On the formality front, I found it best to break this down by dominant pieces of clothing. So a suit is a category, then a tailored jacket, a casual jacket, chinos, jeans, then shorts. There is overlap in this system – if a jacket is worn with jeans for instance – but it works well as a rough indicator of smartness. The same goes for seasons – neither list is mutually exclusive.
Categorising all this has not been a small job (thank you Manish!) and adding new categories will take a while as well, but do let us know what else you might find useful. We waited until this was live deliberately to see what feedback and suggestions people had.
There have been some other improvements too. You were always able to click on ‘Read more’ to see the article the outfit originally came from, which would usually tell you what the clothes were, as well as why I liked them.
But you can also now select ‘Enlarge’ to get the image to fill the screen, so there’s no need to go elsewhere to get a closer look. And there are other tools in the top-right of the screen, which enable zooming and sharing. The page loading itself has also been speeded up.
As with the filtering, let us know here if there are any improvements we can make. The behaviour is slightly different on mobile compared to desktop, but both should have decent UX (my old days as a product manager coming back!).
Do also shout, obviously, if you spot any ‘shorts’ under ‘winter’ or similar.
If you look through all the images you can slowly see my hair receding and then getting shorter. You can see me wearing glasses less. You can see my style fluctuating but also improving, I think: more tasteful and more me.
More usefully, you can filter the page for what to wear tomorrow when it’s raining. Or, for wearing a suit and tie after two years of being entirely neckwear-naked.
I hope it becomes another helpful resource on PS. Other hidden gems, by the way, are a series called ‘The Rules’ which counter-intuitively attempts to stop everyone using that term, and ‘The Essentials’, which is a good place to point anyone who’s new to PS.
Enjoy.
