Fashion is trending social. In a traditionally top down industry, the online fashion community Polyvore has a bottom's up approach toward fashion.

Photo by Ashley Kalinske Bloggers sit front row at the Rebecca Minkoff Show. From Left to Right: Aimee Song of Song of Style, Christina Cardona of Trop Rouge and Carolina Engman of Fashion Squad.

The interactive fashion community Polyvore allows users to interact with fashion in a unique way by allowing them to curate their own style from images all over the web. The results are arranged into fashion collages, or digital mood boards, called sets.

The site, which recently ended its first profitable year, attracts 13 million unique visitors each month — a 114 percent increase since January 2011 and a reach beyond the traffic of any magazine. Its users create more than 1.5 million sets each month, although many just come to browse the sets others have created.

"Polyvore's having an egalitarian effect on the industry," said Polyvore CEO Jess Lee.  "What makes a magazine so special, Vogue, for example, is that they have people with amazing taste and influencers such as Anna Wintour and Andre Leon Talley. But there's another generation of fashion influencers who may not have access to Vogue, but they have access to the Internet. We want to work with that generation."

Just as blogging platforms and social media gave voice to new tastemakers and opened a door for bloggers participate in collaborations with fashion designers and to sit in the coveted front row at fashion shows, Polyvore is exerting its own force on the industry, and evidence of this was very clear at this week's New York Fashion Week.

In this vein, Polyvore teamed up with Procter & Gamble's

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[PG  Loading...      ()   ] Cover Girl to produce Polyvore Live, an event that took place during Fashion Week, a show featuring up-and-coming Fashion Institute of Technology-alum designers and fashion bloggers as models.

"Polyvore Live is our take on Fashion Week, giving fashion to the people," explains Lee. The show was live streamed on their site and more than 15,000 people tuned in.

"We’ve shifted from being a market-driven economy to a consumer-driven economy," said Catherine Moellering, executive vice president of Trend Forecasting at the Tobe Report, a retail trend consulting company. "We used to work in a fashion hierarchy — tastemakers on the top of the fashion pyramid and consumers on the bottom. Now consumers are the ones who are very powerful in shaping the retail landscape and shifting the retail paradigm."

As a result, Polyvore is influencing consumers to create looks and trends versus the past practice of waiting for someone to dictate fashion.

As visitors use the Poylvore site, the company also is able to capture in-depth information regarding the tastes of its 13 million users, according to Polyvore Chief Technology Officer Pasha Sadri.

"We're able to see apples-to-apples, fashion brands, their rankings, brand, price, high-level descriptors such as color, and materials," Sadri said. "There's lots of information at a granular level."

The company shares their data with brands in a monthly published report, which can be used to help brands make business decisions about their hottest products. Polyvore even partners with brands through contests.