Google's boutiques.com: A fashion 'game-changer'?

With a website that custom-searches clothing that suits a woman's style, Google is getting into the rag trade. Will fashion ever be the same?

Boutiques.com plays up prominent fashionistas, like Carey Mulligan, for style and shopping inspiration.
(Image credit: Boutiques.com)

Earlier this week, Google went where it had never dared go before: Fashion. The search engine giant launched Boutiques.com, a new clothing and accessories site that uses a visual search engine to determine a user's unique style and scour the web for clothing that suits her. (At present, the site only carries women's clothing.) It also allows users to create their own "virtual boutiques" and to shop at online boutiques created by celebrities and famous designers. Is Boutiques.com a shopping breakthrough?

Yes, it's undoubtedly superior: "Boutiques.com's ultimate game-changer" is "how precisely it analyzes your preferences to give you what you requested," says Cathy Horyn in The New York Times. With seemingly limitless "capabilities and components", the site "significantly improves how fashion is presented and sold online" and it "may also change how people shop for clothes."

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