Style Gallery on MSN mixes fashion editorial with user-generated content

Style for all, by all—that's the idea behind StyleGallery.com, a fashion site launched in mid-April by Benjamin Media in Copenhagen.  This community Web site offers daily fashion inspiration, with half of the content coming from professional fashion writers and the other half coming from visitors.

"Benjamin publishes a number of magazines in the lifestyle segment, including Costume, Denmark's largest fashion magazine," says Anders Kragelund, Interactive Manager at Benjamin Media. "Some years ago, we started talking about using the Costume brand to do something cooler on the net, and the first idea was to call it "MyCostume". But then we decided to create an entirely new brand, a collaboration between Costume and MSN Style. And it became StyleGallery."

On StyleGallery.com, anyone can upload pictures of herself in her latest outfit, and get comments from other visitors. Each day, Costume's photographers go out on the streets and look for well-dressed girls to capture for the site. Costume then selects a few images to compete for the title "Outfit of the Week". The fashion editors also give tips on the latest trends, illustrated with examples from the users' own images. The target group is "girls with good taste, who do not have a blog of their own."

Searching after inspiration is perhaps the best thing about StyleGallery. You can search for brands, clothing, style, season and color.  Visitors can enter "blue shorts", "black pants" or "zebra striped shirt" and see how other visitors with those garments have put together their outfit. Users can tag their outfits as Classic, Party, Funky, Girly, Raw or Vintage.

Thanks to the cooperation with MSN, which links directly to StyleGallery from their home page, traffic on the site has quickly risen. "Costume gives us quality, MSN gives us quantity," as Anders Kragelund puts it.

Despite the fact that the Danish site been up for less than three months, the figures are already impressive: 80,000 unique visitors and 1.7 million page views per month. And Anders Kragelund is already looking for the next step—a launch in Norway may not be far away.