If you’ve ever visited any of the world’s most fashionable cities, you know they’re full of impossibly glamorous people who aren’t about to give a clueless tourist any tips on where to shop. To help hapless tourists out, online marketplace Farfetch has just launched Farfetch Discover, a free iPhone app that acts as a shoppable tour guide to nine urban style meccas: London, Paris, Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Lisbon, Rotterdam, and Berlin. Guides to additional cities will roll out each month.
Farfetch sells goods online from more than 300 boutiques around the world. With Farfetch Discover, the company has found a way to capitalize on the brick-and-mortar versions of these stores–to bridge e-commerce and old-school shopping. The app highlights shops, restaurants, and bars to visit, so users won’t get stuck shopping at fast fashion chain stores in cities renowned for their unique boutiques. A dropdown menu lets you choose which city guide to peruse. Users can then peruse a selection of 120,000 products by more than 2,000 designers, filtering them by designers, boutiques, locations, or women’s/men’s, and make purchases either directly from the app or in person while checking out the stores.
The app’s city and style guides are written by local tastemakers. In the New York City guide, for example, Leandra Medine of the wildly popular style blog Man Repeller offers tips for an afternoon in her neighborhood of chic Nolita, recommending quirky restaurant like Jack’s Wife Freda and dancing at the bar Acme. The interface uses location tracking to show which picks are closest to you in an “Around Me” feature. (While I was playing around with the app, it revealed some hidden gems: I knew I lived close to the Brooklyn Museum, but I’ve never been to nearby restaurants Milk River or Mayfields, which DJ Kiss recommends in her “Day in Brooklyn” itinerary.) You can save your favorite finds to create a personalized itinerary. In addition to these it-girl-curated days, editorial features offer style tips woven into local history–“Dress Like an Italian Fashion Icon,” for example, tells tales of Milanese mavens like Rudolph Valentino and tells you how to cop their style while shopping in their hometown.
On the whole, using the app feels a bit like reading a hybrid fashion magazine/history book/highly curated city guide on your phone, combined with a chic, discerning, and better-designed version of Yelp.
Check out Farfetch Discover at the iTunes Store here.
[h/t: Women’s Wear Daily]
