What a teese! Burlesque star Dita Von Teese introduced her lingerie line at Bloomindale’s. She later wore a Zac Posen dress over her undies.
Burlesque beauty Dita Von Teese wants to see Americans in their underwear. Confidenti@l caught up to Von Teese at the Bloomingdale’s launch of her latest lingerie line, where she told us the success of her Von Follies brand in Australia has her titillated to launch the sexy U.S. line.
“I worked in a lingerie store from when I was 15 to when I was 24,” said Von Teese, flanked by scantily clad models, all of whom could’ve been mistaken for young Rita Hayworths. “I felt like I learned about the power of lingerie in so many different ways and not even as a tool of seduction; that came later, and it’s still secondary to me. It’s how it makes me feel.”
Von Teese doesn’t sketch her own lingerie designs, but rather mixes and matches from her library of in-demand lingerie catalogs, ranging from the ’30s to the ’60s. “I have a huge archive,” she said. “A lot of museums borrow from my collection for exhibits.”
‘COUGAR’ ON THE PROWL
She turns 50 this year, but Courteney Cox is living the enviable life of a rock star’s girlfriend. The “Cougar Town” star rode around Los Angeles in a Range Rover with her boyfriend, Snow Patrol singer Johnny McDaid, before getting dropped off at a Beverly Hills meeting. McDaid sealed their send-off with a kiss.
SEAN’S FRENCH KISS
Dont tell Charlize Theron! Sean Penn, 53, said goodbye to French actress Adele Exarchopoulous, 20, with a smooch on the cheek after the two ate lunch together in Paris on Saturday.
THE GREEN HIP HOPPER
It ain’t easy being green. Kermit the Frog rapped with SiriusXM’s Shade 45 channel, where he implied his longtime girlfriend Miss Piggy lies about her age and told deejays Whoo Kid and Sam Roberts it’s cool if they want to eat frog legs — just not his.
“I’m not going to get upset, because I accept my place on the food chain,” Kermit said while promoting his new movie, “Muppets Most Wanted.” And he admitted, “We are spicy.”
Sean Penn gives French actress Adele Exarchopoulous a smooch on the cheek.
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It’s kissing time! Courteney Cox smooches beau and Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid (l.) and Sean Penn (c.) gives actress Adele Exarchopolous a peck on the cheek in Paris. C’mon Kermit, plant a wet one on Piggy!
BYRNE-ING IT UP ON STAGE
Brazilian Girls singer Sabina Sciubba enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime helping hand while performing songs from her solo debut, “Toujours,” at Highline Ballroom Thursday night. “Talking Heads” singer David Byrne surprised audience members by sharing the stage with the Grammy-nominated songstress, whom he worked with in 2009 when the two sang an English version of the Brazilian Girls’ “Losing Myself” off the band’s “New York City” album.
‘GOTHAM’ POLICE OUT IN FORCE
Holy Big Apple film shoots! Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue were in town to shoot scenes, including the dustup above, for their new Fox series “Gotham.” The show is a prequel to the “Batman” tales we all know and love. Logue stars as Gotham City police detective Harvey Bullock. MacKenzie plays detective James Gordon, who started on the streets before becoming police commissioner.
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Brazilian Girls singer Sabina Sciubba (l.) shared stage with Talking Heads David Byrne at Highline Ballroom on Thursday. Parker Posey (c.) took in a show at Lynn Redgrave Theater on Bleeker St. Lady Gaga (r.) wigs out with some blond locks.
GAGA STILL LOOKS WIGGY
Thankfully, Lady Gaga is sporting a new wig since the live-vomiting incident at her concert last week. Gaga appeared on the “Today” show Friday to show off her music video for the new single “G.U.Y.,” which was filmed for six straight days at the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, Calif. “I will let the winds of life take me where they may,” Gaga told the show’s Savannah Guthrie.
RICHES OF CULTURE
The Lynn Redgrave Theater on Bleecker St. has been packed with stars this week, as Parker Posey, Kathy Najimy and Taylor Negron popped in to see the Culture Project production of Mike Albo’s solo show “The Junket.” Taking in Dan Hoyle’s solo show, “The Real Americans,” were Bob Balaban, Aidan Quinn and Marsha Garces Williams. The Culture Project creates collaborations between human rights organizations and artists.
IT’S SHOWTIME FOR KIPS BAY HOUSE
The annual Kips Bay President’s Dinner will be held at Cipriani 42nd St. on April 22. The dinner is the official kickoff and biggest fund-raiser for the Kips Bay Decorator Show House, which brings together the designing elite to raise money for the Kips Bay Boys Girls Club and after-school programs for New York City kids.
Every year, designers transform a luxury Manhattan home into an elegant exhibition of fine furnishings, art and technology. This year, they chose Madison Ave.’s iconic Villard Mansion, adjacent to the Palace Hotel.
Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin filming “Still Alice” on Long Island.
MOORE FUN FOR BALDWIN
If there’s one thing Julianne Moore’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted character in “Still Alice” knows, it’s that she loves making out with Alec Baldwin. The two actors filmed scenes this week on Long Island, where Moore jumped onto the rocks next to a grinning Baldwin and showered him with kisses. All in a day’s work.
OLD 97’S HAVE SOMETHING NEW
Here’s good news for old-school alt-rock fans who like raspy-voiced vocals and catchy guitar riffs. Behind-the-scenes footage of former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson recording “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” for the Old 97’s’ new album, “Most Messed Up,” is making the rounds in advance of the band’s upcoming tour, which starts in April before coming to Webster Hall on June 3. The album, which comes out April 29, also features a cover of the Clash classic “Career Opportunities.”
The UpTake: Jess Lee left a great job at Google to lead fashion startup Polyvore. She’s just one of the upstarts looking to remake fashion in the high-tech image.
Around 2008, Jess Lee had a job most in the Silicon Valley would kill for. As a product manager at Google Inc., Lee was working in its strategically important maps division on some of the company’s most interesting products.
So when a friend at Google turned her on to a new fashion startup, Polyvore, she wasn’t looking for a new job.
“I just fell in love with it,” Lee said of Polyvore. “I sent a note to the founders, just outlining what I liked and didn’t about it. And they ended up hiring me as the first product manager.”
The growth of Polyvore Inc., which enables users to create and share their own custom fashion spreads on the Web, illustrates a critical point. When you create a fashion product with a personal connection, it draws people in. And Polyvore is not alone in that realization.
In the past few years, fashion tech has gone ultrapersonal, using technologies like mobile, Big Data and social media to wrestle a piece of the $1.2 trillion global fashion industry away from brick-and-mortar stores and big online storefront incumbents like Zappos and Amazon.com Inc.
Lee, who became Polyvore’s CEO in 2012, said that focus on users is still part of the company. Polyvore keeps a wall of customer letters and feedback in a prominent place in its office to remind employees who they’re designing for.
“Fashion isn’t a normal tech problem,” she said. “It’s not a search problem. It’s about taste, very personal taste.”
Polyvore solves the taste problem by harnessing users’ creativity: They design and share fashion spreads while Polyvore gathers data on how they use the site.
This gives the company insight into what users like — the brands they’re into, the styles they put together — that Lee says forms a “taste graph” analogous to the “social graph” that Facebook has successfully monetized by selling custom ads.
Polyvore currently makes most of its money through affiliate advertising — every item of clothing on the site links back to a page where the user can buy it, and Polyvore earns an affiliate fee if its link leads to a sale. It also gets money from native advertising.
Polyvore’s approach is working, at least in terms of audience growth. With about 20 million monthly unique visitors, it’s the largest online community dedicated to fashion.
The company declined to share revenue or profit numbers, but it is outperforming its competition, Pinterest, on a key metric. The average purchase arising from a Polyvore visit is worth about $220, while Pinterest’s average purchase totals about $160, the companies have reported. Polyvore has also been profitable since 2011, whereas Pinterest has yet to generate revenue despite its $3.8 billion valuation.
Startups are proliferating in fashion because it’s too big for e-retailers to ignore. U.S. consumers alone spend about $250 billion on clothing each year, according to Hoovers.
And while e-commerce has taken over many industries — think books and music — fashion has lagged. According to the research firm eMarketer, only about 20 percent of all U.S. clothing purchases will be made online by 2016. That’s compared to the roughly 63 percent of U.S. retail sales Forrester says are already made all or in part online.
But launching a fashion startup in Silicon Valley is risky. Fashion is not your typical tech startup, and founders ignore that at their peril, said Patricia Nakache, a partner at the Menlo Park, California-based venture firm Trinity Ventures.
Nakache, an active investor in e-commerce, has backed some of the hottest startups in the fashion-tech business, including Zulily, a Seattle-based baby apparel and accessory site that raised $253 million when it went public in 2013, one of the highest-profile exits for the industry.
The biggest difference, Nakache said, is the logistical hurdle of dealing with inventory from a complex supply chain, as well as the inevitable issue of how to handle returns — something that’s deceptively difficult for entrepreneurs with software backgrounds who expect to solve problems with all-night hackathons.
“If a startup pitches me and they haven’t thought about managing inventory, that’s a red flag,” Nakache said. “It means they don’t really understand the business they’re getting into.”
Another issue — if you want to elbow into the fashion industry with technology, then make sure your technology is actually useful to paying customers, Nakache said.
A startup is competing with the in-store experience, and the in-store experience offers at least one advantage that’s hard to replicate online — the ability to try on clothes before you buy them. So you need to offer an experience customers can’t get otherwise, she said.
Take Weddington Way Inc., a San Francisco startup Nakache invested in that has raised about $2.5 million. The site sells bridesmaids’ dresses and bridal party accessories, and has sold about 15,000 dresses, registered a half-million brides and sold merchandise to 10,000 wedding parties.
Rather than treating each dress as a single transaction, Weddington is based around the idea that choosing clothing for a wedding party is akin to a collaborative project. It incorporates features more commonly seen in project management software than an e-commerce platform — a private showroom and chat program to let the wedding party collaborate and discuss options.
The ability to tailor the experience is one of the great advantages provided by e-commerce — everyone walks into the same store, but an e-commerce site can change to meet the user, said Weddington founder and CEO Ilana Stern.
Another example is the lingerie market, dominated by a few big players. Victoria’s Secret, the largest by far, controls upwards of 30 percent, according to NPD Group.
To compete as a newcomer, San Francisco lingerie company True Co. uses the natural advantage of an e-commerce platform – in this case, being able to gather more data about a customer’s needs and preferences — to deliver a better experience, said founder Michelle Lam.
“We have data on over 6,000 different body types, which means we’re able to deliver 6,000 different shopping experiences tailored to each user,” she said. “Every woman wants to be treated like an individual, especially when it comes to this product category. It’s more emotional, and the more emotional a product is, the more opportunity there is to create a dialogue.”
True Co. has raised about $6 million so far.
Another gamechanger for startups: Mobile. Manish Chandra is founder and CEO of Poshmark, a Menlo Park mobile app company that matches buyers with sellers of used clothing. Chandra attributes the success of his company, which sells more than a million items a year and has raised about $15.5 million in funding, to a focus on mobile.
Mobile removes friction from the buying process, Chandra said. Customers no longer have to be in the store or in front of their computers. In the future, Chandra said retail will mean discovering new products anywhere, buying them anywhere, and having them delivered anywhere. That means the brands of the future will be the ones that are most able to integrate themselves into a consumer’s life — something retailers in other industries could learn from fashion, he said.
“The winners in the future are going to be the ones that can create transcendental relationships with consumers,” Chandra said.
Ultimately, the winners are consumers, Polyvore’s Lee said. Fashion-tech is creating an industry that’s more beholden to their needs than the elitist fashion world of the past.
“Fashion is ripe for disruption,” she said. “Because a lot of the ways things are done now — fashion-of-the-week shows, buyers, very powerful editors in major fashion capitals — these were the ways that trends were distributed, and they weren’t very democratic. But the Internet democratizes everything.”
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