Tagwalk Takes on the Hemline Index

Van Houtte—in Chloé sneakers, soft black pants, and a long black coat embroidered with frangipani and chrysanthemums—founded the company in 2016. At the time, she was assisting a stylist, who was preparing for a shoot with Angelina Jolie and needed to see black dresses: every single one on the market. Van Houtte got to work, clicking through slide shows, screenshotting looks, compiling them into PDFs, and compressing the documents, then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. “It was massive torture,” she recalled. Now a buyer or a designer or an editor can enter “black dress” into Tagwalk and, within seconds, find seventeen thousand four hundred and ninety-seven of them, from a 2019 fish-net number by Dolce & Gabbana to a one-shouldered mini from Balenciaga’s recent show in L.A.