Pinterest Shuffles vs. Polyvore
Is this the Polyvore replacement we’ve all been waiting for?
In the early 2010s there was a website that had a chokehold on my downtime hours as a college student: Polyvore.
Polyvore was similar to sites like its contemporary, Pinterest, in that you could “clip” images from other sites to your account and organize them. Unlike Pinterest, which is mainly a place to organize images into sections or “boards,” Polyvore was all about taking your image library and turning it into collages, or “sets.”
I have always loved making mood boards, especially mood boards of fashion I wish I could wear. As a teen I cut pictures of clothes out of magazines and glued down my own new spreads into spiral notebooks.
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When Polyvore came along it felt like a huge evolutionary step forward. Suddenly I had access to MILLIONS of potential images that I could virtually “clip” instantaneously and reuse and rearrange as many times as I desired! No glue required!
I fell hard for this new technology and spent hours curating my virtual closet and creating fashion collages based on themes. I also joined Polyvore groups and entered competitions.
As a person who has always been fat and has faced difficulty comfortably and fashionably clothing my body my whole life, creating these collages was soothing. In reality I could never quite express my style the way I wanted to, but on Polyvore I had the world’s most fabulous closet! This was a space where I could be whoever I wanted to be.
For a few years there Polyvore was my go-to place to unwind and dream online. My interest faltered slightly as I aged into my 20s and got busier with life, but I still checked in from time to time.
Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, Polyvore disappeared off of the face of the Internet! There was no warning, no opportunity to save one’s collages and closet’s or move one’s following there to other sites. It just up and POOF! Disappeared.
For years I thought I had lost everything. I used to share most of my finished collages to Facebook but after Polyvore went down the old embedded links didn’t work anymore. Then one day I was going through my old Tumblr account and realized that I had shared them there too, and that those images had survived. That’s the only reason I’m able to share these with you today. I made so many more sets that just became lost Internet media.
In the immediate years after Polyvore’s demise I thought surely some other site would come around to pick up its mantle, but none did. Every now and then something would come up that people claimed was similar, but none of them had the advanced image clipping and background removing technology of Polyvore.
As smartphones became more and more ubiquitous I thought a replacement must be right around the corner. The only thing that could make Polyvore better was a touchscreen and the ability to use it in a doctor’s office waiting room! But I waited and waited in vein.
That is until about a year ago, when I learned about Pinterest’s new app, Shuffles.
I joined Pinterest around the same time as Polyvore and have kept an active account all of these years. I think I’ve racked up something like 40,000 pins and hundreds of boards at this point. I have boards for personal style, art, travel, home decor, and pretty much all of my interests.
The site has been through many different phases, some that I’ve liked and others I haven’t. These days, like a lot of sites, the algorithm sucks and my homepage is full of garbage AI images, ads, and things I’ve already saved before. However, I still find the archive of things I’ve saved on Pinterest useful and reference it all the time.
Do I need to paint a nighttime illustration and am not sure how to handle the colors? I have a board dedicated to night images I like for inspiration.
Am I planning a trip? Let me check my travel boards to see if I’ve already pinned something cool to do in that area.
Am I having trouble figuring out storage solutions for my studio? Let me spend hours pouring over images of beautifully organized shelves.
It makes a lot of sense that Pinterest would finally pick up the mantle of Polyvore, it really only surprises me that they didn’t do it sooner. Pinterest has always been known as the “mood board site” but in actuality Pinterest boards are more of a collection of images than a mood board. Everything is laid out on the screen in its entirety, with no ability to crop images or layer them. You used to have the ability to add notes below images but then they took that away. Pinterest’s analogue equivalent would be more similar to slicing full pages out of magazines and attaching them to a scroll than it is to the collaged notebooks I made as a child. However, they have always had the library of images and a huge user base of crafty individuals. Why not take it a step further and allow users to create their own new images?
I’ve been having fun experimenting with Shuffles this past year. The vibe is different than Polyvore off the bat because it encompasses more imagery beyond fashion. To be fair people clipped non-fashion items to Polyvore from the beginning but still, most sets were fashion-based. Alternatively, most people on Shuffles seem to use it to create art collages, more similar to a page in a bullet journal than an actual mood board with a specific utilitarian bent. But it is still a pretty good tool for mood boarding and has most of the same capabilities as Polyvore
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For my recent trip to New England (which I will write about in detail over the next few days) I created a mood board to help me pack. This was totally utilitarian so I didn’t attempt to make it very pretty, I just wanted to narrow down the relevant ideas from my 2024 style inspiration Pinterest board into a single reference image. The app allows you to pull images from multiple image sources on the web and your phone, including your own Pinterest boards, so it is really simple to take my existing library and style it in new ways.
I have also been using Shuffles to make mood boards for each room in my apartment. I have extensive Pinterest boards for each room, each full of hundreds of images. I find these boards helpful in their own right but sometimes it is nice to have a narrower and more specific image to look at to remind myself of my overall goals.
One feature that Polyvore had way back when that Shuffles does not is that users could click on the individual items in a person’s collage and click through to a sale link to buy it. Often these links lead to a 404 page because the item was old and had sold out, but this was still helpful because it could help you find out the brand name and more about the item. In general I am tired of every site becoming a shopping mall but I am a fan of sites that mine other people’s images making it easy to track down the original source. For now when you click on items in Shuffles you can add it to your library or make a new collage with it but you get no information about where the image came from. This is unfair to the original creators but also to those of us who seek inspiration. So much of my early years as an artist on the internet involved me finding something cool and then following the thread of that thing back to more work by that artist, and then more art by the folks who inspired them. When an image is divorced from its context and altered beyond the ability to reverse search it, it is like erecting a brick wall in front of our curiosity. Crediting creators helps us all!
So is Shuffles the Polyvore replacement we (okay, maybe just me) have all been waiting for?
Not quite, but of all the alternatives I’ve tried it is the closest I’ve ever found. For this I am thankful and look forward to using Shuffles whenever I want to make a quick collage to better organize my ideas visually! That is at least until it too suddenly disappears off the face of the earth.