Tumblr's David Karp and Mashable interviewer Lauren Indvik at Decoded Fashion. (Photo: Decoded Flickr)

Armed with infographics and and boundless enthusiasm, tech prodigy David Karp wowed the audience at the fashion-tech conference Decoded Fashion on Monday with Tumblr’s astonishing growth and success.

Betabeat was sipping coffee in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall when we saw a young-ish man walk in. He looked like a well-dressed college coed, in a dark suit, black tie and gray sneakers. It wasn’t until we got a good look at his face (and shaggy bowlcut) that we realized we were looking at Mr. Karp, the founder and CEO of Tumblr, and one of the closest things the tech world has to a rock star. A very nice, sort of nerdy rock star.

Mr. Karp settled into his seat onstage with an enthusiastic wave, plying the audience with slides detailing Tumblr’s insane growth. For example, Tumblr has 16 billion pageviews a month, soon to reach 17 billion, with 600 posts per second.

Karp’s slides had the classic “Tumblr blue” background as he explained Tumblr’s ecosystem of creators, curators and audience, as well as fashion’s role in the Tumblrverse. Though the website has received scrutiny and crticism recently for its problematic relationship with fashion, Mr. Karp demonstrated Tumblr’s growing ties with the fashion community, including some of the best examples of fashion tumblrs (Vogue, Dolce & Gabbana, the New York Times magazine).

“Anyone inspired by world fashion... can participate with fashion in meaningful ways,” said Mr. Karp. “At its core, it’s a creative community... a creative platform with the creative ability to tell stories.”

Mr. Karp was engaging and answered questions quickly and without hesitation in a clipped accent. He spoke vaguely of “leveraging unique resources to add value to Tumblr,” though it was unclear if he was talking about existing Tumblr features or ones to be rolled out.

Mashable's Lauren Indvik brought up Tumblr’s recent gaffes with the fashion industry, but Mr. Karp was dismissive in the most friendly of ways. “It was heavily publicized,” he said of Tong's departure, and insisted that the difference incidents be “decoupled.” He stated that a maligned effort by Tumblr's former fashion director Rich Tong was just a proposal sent out for feedback, and that someone merely decided to make “a big fuss” about its contents prematurely. He then spoke glowingly of Valentine Uhovski, the new director for Tumblr’s fashion (with a promise of pulling together Fashion Week programming).

Mr. Karp also spoke of the multitude of bloggers who use the site, assuring that Tumblr gives them more “touch points” into the industry.

“I don’t think anyone else... gives opportunities in this platform,” he said confidently.

But what seemed to be the centerpiece of the keynote was Tumblr’s new plan for advertisers (i.e., Tumblr's monetization strategy). Tumblr will be rolling out a new, two-pronged advertising schema. Advertisers will be allowed access to the Tumblr Spotlight, a portion of the site that new users can browse, which Mr. Karp called a “major point of discussion.” Mr. Karp is also letting advertisers into the Tumblr Radar section of the site, which heretofore only featured sites chosen by Tumblr. Mr. Karp did not elaborate as to who the advertisers will be or the nature of the ads.

He credited Tumblr’s previous lack of advertisements to his own reservations. He did not hide his (friendly!) contempt for advertising, emphasizing that Tumblr is a creative community which values expression, which advertising, in his opinion, is not.

So change is coming to Tumblr. Even if it’s just a stray advertisement in a small areas of the site later this week, Mr. Karp’s keynote highlighted how change is inevitable for something so dynamic and immense.

Decoded Fashion's Consumer Powered Design panel with Ari Goldberg, Louis Monoyudis, Nina Cherny and Joyann King (Photo: Decoded Flickr)

It's far from perfect, but the fashion industry is in a committed relationship with technology. The day-long Decoded Fashion event at Lincoln Center on Monday explored the facets of the fusion of tech and fashion. While the two can get along swimmingly, the fashion industry's understanding of tech is limited, and technology is (currently) unable to fix some of fashion's biggest problems.

Comprised of ten panels with three keynotes (including Tumblr's wunderkind David Karp), the event celebrated technology’s role in the fashion industry, though many panels also addressed the myriad problems that fashion faces with its expansion online in the era of social media.

By now, it’s a given that fashion has to have a social media presence, but there are five platforms you “can’t not do” as a brand, most notably Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, according to tech-savvy fashionistas.

Representatives of different brands differed on which they found to be the most valuable. While many lauded the click-through properties of Twitter, more found that Facebook was the most lucrative for actual sales. In fact, Stylecaster's Ari Goldberg noted that for some brands, Facebook drove three times the traffic of Twitter. Instagram and Tumblr remain virtual lookbooks for brands, and though the designers of the CFDA panel swore the photo app was their favorite, neither has as much success as other social media when it comes to actually pushing product.

All of the designers of the CFDA panel (from Alice+Olivia, kate spade and Nicole Miller) viewed social media as a narrative device, each one a different storefront window to fill up with the right sort of content. While some panels used social media to talk about numbers, designers and creatives viewed it as a tool for spread of their brands over the Internet, or “creating the world of the brand,” as Ms. Bendet termed it.

The general consensus of the day was that Pinterest will be the next big social media outlet. Though that may not be breaking news, the fashion industry is coming for the fledgling site. Already, brands like Saks have pinboards which are connected to their main sites.

While the conference celebrated the use of technology in fashion, there was a theme of "technology as obstacle" that pervaded several panels. The Internet creates a gap between retailer and consumer, one which startups, technology and social media are trying to bridge, with varying degrees of success.

The "Investor Reveal" panel staffed by venture capitalists and the session entitled “Consumer-Powered Design” spoke to fashion’s problematic relationship with the Internet. Panelists throughout the day implied that there is a misunderstanding by the majority of the fashion industry of how the fashion business translates into e-commerce. Members of some panels went so far as to call the fashion industry "broken."

“Fashion is laggard when it comes to data,” said Mr. Goldberg, who asserted that the industry would be transformed once it got its online act together.

Social media was not the only method presented as means for pushing product; there was plenty of tech, including a dazzling video panel. (FYI, interactive video is about to happen in a major way.)

Each panel may have looked at fashion and technology's relationship a different way, but ultimately it is a relationship: both rewarding and frustrating, sometimes successful and occasionally a disaster. Despite the boom of startups and innovative use of social media, it seems that the fashion industry needs to decode technology to succeed.

SparkRebel.

In the land of the Internet startup, it seems the latest discovery is... well... the discovery. The algorithm is king in the quest to give users exactly what they want in order to (hopefully) turn a profit. SparkRebel, a Pinterest-like (but not Pinterest! they insist) fashion discovery site, is the latest fashion-focused social media startup to crop up out of New York.

Although founder and CEO Elad Baron insists SparkRebel is different from “other websites” (“Pinterest” never crossed his lips in our conversation), the similarities between the two sites are striking. On Pinterest, you “pin” images which go on your “boards,” pages on which you can arrange images of things you like. On SparkRebel, you can add “sparks” or “respark” items to your “collections,” which is the same basic idea. You can follow users and their collections on SparkRebel just as you can on Pinterest.

“The next wave is in discovery, and fashion is a great candidate,” Mr. Barons said. “You're not looking for a specific cardigan. You're looking for ideas and inspiration. You need to get inspired and discover things.”

The new site, which opened up this week from a private beta, looks like it’s designed for teens and those suffering from MySpace nostalgia: charcoal gray background, funky geometric logo in neon colors, hot pink hover links, and bright backgrounds. Unlike other fashion startups, SparkRebel seems to appeal directly to a youthful set who shop at the mall.

But while Pinterest may be overrun by photos of food and wedding updos, SparkRebel is devoted exclusively to fashion. SparkRebel makes money off affiliate designers and retailers when a SparkRebel user clicks through to buy. But only a small amount of the content on SparkRebel is for sale, and is wedged between artful editorials snagged from fashion websites and pictures of celebs on the red carpet.

With the ability to import images from anywhere on the Internet, SparkRebel runs the risk of having a site whose merchandise is engulfed by outside content. SparkRebel does not plan to curate or police the content on the suggestion-driven pages, Mr. Baron said; thus the merchandise that SparkRebel needs to sell to get revenue for their site may not be prominent--or even visible-- for some users.

The site could also do with a more comprehensive sidebar of categories. Though you can search through shoes fairly easily, you can only filter the 200-plus pages of dresses by brand or budget, and 79 pages of swimsuits by price. The site may be about fashion discovery, but some people know what they want without clicking through endless pages. Using it as an actual shopping resource is barely possible. This is definitely for the grazers who probably have Pinterest up in the next tab of their browsers.

SparkRebel is new enough that it can still live off of the funding it received from its investors (over $1 million from angels and venture capitalists in its seed round). However, to be lucrative past the point of survival, SparkRebel needs to make money off of its affiliate networks.

SparkRebel may not have to go head-to-head with better-funded and established fashion startups if users are attracted to its Pinterest-like fashion discovery features—the “trending” page looks like a direct knock-off—and will buy merchandise from the brands in SparkRebel’s stable, much of which holds appeal for middle and upper class teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Just like in fashion, a bit of borrowing—or stealing—is bound to occur. SparkRebel's youthful niche may give it raison d'etre. But with new Pinterest-like sites practically raining from the sky, SparkRebel is easily lost in the flood.

Mr. Morton.

For an industry based entirely on trends, fashion is having a social media moment.

Designers and retailers have their own social media accounts, using Twitter, Facebook and other sites to hawk their goods to people who enjoy spending their time quantifying their friends through a number on a webpage. Fashion-centric startups are increasingly en vogue. There is even a blog to keep track of them all: FashInvest, "where fashion meets finance."

Among the stream of startups of varying degrees of success is New York and London-based Lyst, which first piqued our interest at Fashion Week, when a friendly publicist pitched the site to us with a wide smile.

Lyst is sort of like Twitter, kinda like Tumblr, comparable to Pinterest and described as a fashion version of Pandora or Last.fm. Basically, it’s a fancy digital catalog. Fashionistas can sign-up through their Twitter or Facebook accounts, and after a few questions are directed to their “Stylefeed,” which is an endlessly scrollable display of curated items. Connecting with one's friends via social networks, or following fashion bloggers affiliated through the site, will tailor the content on users' feeds.

CEO and co-founder Chris Morton describes the site as a tool for “fashion discovery,” cutting through the white noise of the behemoth fashion industry.

Lyst was born in 2010 with a seed round which raised close to a million pounds from various investment companies, including Accel, Ventrex and angels in New York and London. Mr. Morton and his co-founder and CTO Sebastjan Trepca had no prior business experience or knowledge of fashion prior to Lyst.

“We had more of a personal interest in fashion,” said Mr. Morton, calling the fashion industry a puzzle he finds, “perfectly interesting.”

Mr. Morton is a former investor and business manager who graduated from Cambridge and speaks with the expected accent. Mr. Morton is quite young; in the photo that accompanies his interview on the blog Fashion We Like, he strikes a dashing pose in a stylish suit, with his dark hair in a Don Draper-like coif.

Mr. Trepca studied computer science and was previously the VP of Engineering at Noovo, a content discovery startup.

Lyst has already put down roots, with 500 global affiliates, relationships with tens of thousands of designers (displaying merchandise directly from individuals and major houses, who get the bulk of the profits after Lyst takes its cut) and hundreds of thousands of users.

If you use the site to connect with your friends, you'll likely get a lot out of it--provided you have friends with good taste and style. If your friends have no style, well, you're going to have a tacky feed. Regardless, Lyst needs lots of users in devoted social circles to be an effective “social media” fashion website, much less a purveyor of goods.

Lyst has money riding on its success as a social media website. Because it is a pure affiliate model, it only gets money if its users buy items after seeing them on Lyst. So the people sharing and Tweeting, blogging and Pinning, need to buy enough clothes to keep the website afloat. Vice-versa, serious shoppers who prefer the site for the personalized shopping experience, need to purchase enough goods to power the thousands of users who use it purely for gawking at fashion and social networking. But how many of those members are buying? And will they buy enough?

Though Mr. Morton touts the social media experience of the site, it like many of the other fashion affiliate websites uses an algorithm as the basis for its shopping recommendations. While the algorithms may be influenced by your interactions with friends, ultimately the items that pop up on your Lyst page are churned out by software that generates suggestions based on the info you type in.

The website is easy to navigate, with a classic (or cliched?) fashion-y black and white color scheme and slick serif fonts. Tags across the top of the site take you to the designers, stores and categories in Lyst's stable. Users can be ultra-specific with their queries with the sidebar running up the left side of the page, with categories including gender, price, sales, colors, designers and stores. Whittling down the general site to find the perfect pair of shoes (to use an obvious example) is fast and easy, especially for a determined shopper.

For strict research purposes, I decided to look for women's loafers, something I had been seeing around on the street--and also because the cost of the strappy heels and platforms showing up on the unfiltered shoe category made me do a mental spit-take. Not everyone can be a Carrie Bradshaw; a girl’s got rent to pay.

It was pretty easy to find options. Obviously, there are more choices the higher your budget, but in many categories Lyst has cheaper items. Still, it hurt to scroll lazily through my Stylefeed and see gorgeous Marchesa dresses retailing for the same amount as a semester's tuition.

Fashion is a fickle creature, both on the runway and on the web, which has claimed startups before Lyst (ToVieFor, Catwalk Genius, MyNines, Tote). Fashion designers have publicly aired frustrations with Tumblr, which has become insanely popular with fashionistas but hasn’t been as successful with fashion houses. While the concept of a fashion site integrating social media is very “now,” it is ultimately the business of fashion which will decide the website's fate.

There will never be a lack of authoritative voices guiding the consumer toward trends. Fashion is a top-down business that requires tastemakers to function. Consider the success that individual fashion bloggers like Bryanboy and the teenaged Tavi Gevinson have had making a dent on the upper echelons of fashion. But how many of your Facebook friends and Twitter followers are hardly Bryanboys and Tavis? Fashion craves critics and abhors a popular vote. Unlike the industry, many fashion startups are bottom-up—and that's why they, well, go bottom up.

Lyst says it has hundreds of thousands of registered users. But how many of those users are there to compare their taste with their friends, and how many are there to shell out big money on designer labels, especially when there are similar fashion startups, online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter, department store websites and designers themselves?

Lyst functions both as a diversion and a shopping resource. It needs enough people using it for the latter to survive, though the social media appeal of the site draws what is doubtlessly a more youthful contingent of shoppers with smaller disposable incomes. Ultimately, Lyst needs money to run, which depends upon volume of sales and revenue from their affiliates.

The company is going to have to pull massive sales to stay afloat in the fashion business online (if its large funding round is any indication) and there are definitely a few holes in Lyst’s seams. But can Lyst buck the trend of failed fashion startups? Mr. Morton thinks so, and he’s convinced more than a few fashionistas.