 "Photo: Ryan Killian")
Austin City Limits and South by Southwest have made Austin famous for its music scene. Whole Foods brought notoriety to Austin's organic, healthy vibe. Episodes of "Extreme Home Makeover" and "This Old House" gave Austin a green, environmentally friendly reputation.
Now, UT alumna Beth Lambert seeks to bring national attention to Austin again, this time for the city's sense of style, with her fashion blog, styleshaker.com.
"Austin is growing and changing, and it is interesting because of all the change," Lambert said of why Austin's fashion scene deserves such notice.
Lambert started the blog last year to support and promote Austin's independent designers and retailers. It quickly caught high-profile bicoastal attention: public relations firms in New York, boutiques in Los Angeles and America Online. Additionally, AOL contacted Lambert to write for their style blog. Austin is currently one of only six cities featured on the AOL style blog, and, for the past 2 and a half months, Lambert has been proving that the Austin fashion scene can stand shoulder to shoulder with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco.
Lambert sees the University as an important influence on the Austin fashion scene.
"The young college crowd appreciates individuality," she said. "When you go into college, you're forming an identity, taking everything in to from something else."
Style Shaker reports on the city's emerging fashion trends, provides links to local designers' and retailers' Web sites and serves as a useful tool for savvy shopaholics. The website is divided into three main sections. The first, Shop Austin, gives an overview of places to shop in the city.
The next section, Daily Dish, holds beauty finds and information on sales around town. Daily Dish also contains interviews with Austin's up-and-coming designers, an "it list" of must-haves for the week, online finds and celebrity gossip. If you're out and about and dressed to the nines, you may find yourself on the Daily Dish's street cam, where Lambert posts photos of stylish Austinites she meets on the street.
"My favorite part of the Web site is helping emerging designers build a name for themselves and make a profitable business," Lambert said. "The Web site gets a lot of attention from all over the nation. All of the sudden, these smaller designers have national attention."
The trend-conscious should love the third section, Style Shakedown, because it dissects celebrity outfits and provides readers will cheap alternatives for achieving the same look. Style Shakedown is the brainchild of "Frugal Fashionista" Sally Glover, contributing editor to Style Shaker. Glover also has her own blog, frugal-fashionista.blogspot.com, which focuses entirely on celebrity looks for less. Readers can e-mail celebrity photos to Glover, and she will search for an affordable version of the outfit and post the info online.
During her years at UT, Lambert worked several part-time jobs in retail but majored in biochemistry. She was selected for a panel for Women in the Sciences for the work she did to create a brand new molecule in her independent research program. She graduated in 1996 and went to work in the biotech industry, earning three patents and taking a small start-up company to public standing.
"My parents never considered fashion as a career," she said. "While I was at UT, I was doing Calculus II, because I was told fashion was just a hobby."
Now, Lambert knows better. Fashion has become much more than a hobby - it's the focus of her successful, entrepreneurial career.
"Currently, styleshaker.com is going through a face-lift to become a more robust shopping tool," Lambert said. "Hopefully in the future, it will represent not only Austin, but all of the South and all of Texas."
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