Victoria Magrath - The New Fashion Rules - Inthefrow

3. Magazines are my go-to when I’m travelling. On planes or trains, if I have no work to do, I love opening the pages of Vogue, Elle and Porter magazine to check out the brand adverts and shopping pages, as they are often filled with the latest items to hit the stores.

4. Online magazines are another way to find fashion-styling inspo. I especially love Glamour online, which I am very proud to have started writing a fashion column for in 2018, as well as Marie Claire, Refinery29 and Cosmo . I just click through their latest fashion articles to see what’s trending.

5. Instagram, of course, is daily inspiration. Scrolling through my feed, I like to save the images that show items I want to buy or styles I want to try.

6. Pinterest is another weekly place I like to visit, to see what their top pins are and what others might be loving right now. Making your own pinboards also helps, when you want to save particular outfits or pictures that you love to come back to later.

7

July 2008

Retail goes mobile

What was the last phone app you used? Instagram, Twitter, Notes, Calculator, Mail? Whatever you want to do, there’s an app for it, and I hold my hands up in saying that I spend most of my life moving between about 10 apps on a daily basis.

When the iPhone app store was launched in July 2008, it was a space for games, social media apps and news sites. An assortment of 500 apps to kick-start what would become a rapidly growing hub of iPhone software. So rapidly growing that the number of apps now exceeds 2.8 million. The capabilities of our regular mobile phones got upgraded to the max and Internet efficiency enabled us to start using our phones on the go without having to wait 10 minutes for a webpage to load. It feels like a lifetime ago that the UK was upgraded to 4G in 2012, but now the idea that we used to survive on slow 3G connections seems laughable. It was 3G and 4G capabilities that catapulted ubiquitous mobile usage into the mainstream and now … well, we can buy anything we want from anywhere we want, as long as we have a connection.

(@benjaminrobyn/Unsplash.com)

(Billion Photos/Shutterstock.com)

Over the three years when I was researching for my PhD – focused on the app designs of our fave UK fashion retailers – I spotted all of the updates, upgrades and newly launched native mobile apps. Native apps are the ones you download on the app store that have been built specifically by the brand. It became a craze; every retailer needed one and they were all jumping on board, one after another.

These native apps and responsive mobile websites became more and more user-friendly as retailers started to realise just how important they were to sales. Larger buttons, scrollable images, one-click purchases and all that jazz. Just little tweaks that helped the mobile customer to shop the same way they would on a desktop, but in a handy, travel-sized format. The experience got so handy that it now encourages 66 per cent of ASOS’s customers to search and shop via their mobile. Very handy for ASOS, too.

While I was researching apps, I didn’t realise just how quickly I would fall out of love with them. They were so useful, but now I find myself heading straight to my web browser and searching for a website instead. It’s probably because I spend so much time on a desktop that I am used to shopping via a browser, and I’m in a habit of doing so. Perhaps I just need to give apps another chance, as it’s probably been three years since I used a retail app to shop. Yet ASOS (always innovating) have launched a feature on their native app that enables users to buy now and pay later. It’s only available via the app and will have acquired an entirely new audience for the brand. It’s such a clever concept and a brilliant way to keep people coming back to the mobile app time and time again.

However, as long as the retailer has optimised their website to be responsive to mobile screens, they’re likely to be benefiting from the huge waves of mobile traffic. Even for my blog, more than 50 per cent of my traffic is via mobile and tablets rather than a desktop computer. Brands had better make their mobile sites responsive, or their consumers won’t be.

(Sofie Delauw/Getty Images)

My most-used apps and why they’re amazing

Back when native apps were all the rage, I had app folders filled with my favourite high-street stores, so I could shop them on the go. But as I tend to use my browser for shopping instead these days, I thought I’d share the other apps that I use on my phone daily, and why they’ve become my go-to. I even checked my phone to see which were my most-used:

1. Instagramis number one, for obvious reasons. I’m almost embarrassed to say that 48 per cent of my battery life is spent on the ‘gram in 24 hours. I can spend hours just scrolling the feed, gathering ideas and swooning over how cute my friends’ dogs are.

2. Twitteris my place to read the news. I search through the latest trending stories and moments to catch up, and scroll the feed for a few minutes to see if I’ve missed anything happening in the blogging world.

3. Mail, of course. Every minute or so there’s a new email popping up, so I can’t escape it. I try to answer any emails as soon as they come in – I’m either proactive, or they will only be replied to the week after.

4. Lightroom CCis my go-to app for photo editing. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it allows for so much more control over your imagery, colours and style. I tend to edit on my desktop, but I’m using the app more and more these days.

5. WhatsAppis my way of keeping in contact with friends around the world. My best girlfriends are scattered across a few different continents, so we have a number of groups to allow us to continuously catch up.

6. Camera, because the iPhone camera just keeps getting better and better. Who needs a DSLR anyway?

7. Planolyis the app I use for planning out my Instagram feed. You can drag and drop your images around your picture board to create a faux feed, so you can check if your new photo will fit your aesthetic.

8. YouTubeis my everyday go-to for relaxation and time out. If I’m doing my make-up in the morning, cooking, sitting in the bath, I’ll usually have a YouTube video playing in the background.

9. NotesI use daily. Whether I’m coming up with ideas and need to write them down, or need to send a note to my desktop from my phone over iCloud, I’ll write it into Notes and wait for it to appear on my other connected devices. I have Notes for most things going on in my life, to keep me organised.

10. Dropboxis my favourite for storage. My other half and I have one Dropbox between us that we throw work into when we need to ensure it’s backed up. Plus, it’s a great way to upload files from one device to another if your Airdrop isn’t working or if your device isn’t Apple.

8

March 2011

Kate sells out the Burberry trench

The fashion world went crazy when they saw the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, wearing that Reiss dress for her engagement photos, and the Polly Pushlock Mulberry handbag on a flight to Canada back in 2011. The items sold out in stores faster than the photographs could be printed. In the same year, the Burberry trench coat she wore sold out within hours, as did a £40 Topshop dress she wore back in 2007. This was before the days of Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter, when online news outlets, TV shows and magazines were the first to pick up stories and publish them.