Snappy dressers posting urban styles

Cosmpolitan 27-year-old Sara Picazo works as a communications advisor and likes vintage fashion. Back in May, she was dressed in a romantic ballerina-style skirt for a work meeting she had in the center of Madrid when, unbeknownst to her, she was photographed hailing a cab in Plaza de Colón. The photo began circulating on the internet, finally arriving in a friend's inbox. "You're on a fashion website!" she told Sara.

Picazo's photo had been posted on Loca por tu ropa (Crazy about Your Clothes), a website that publishes pictures of women seen around Madrid in eye-catching outfits (www.locaporturopa.com). The site is the brainchild of Sandra Iniesto and María González, two friends who met after arriving in the capital from Pamplona and Arévalo, Ávila to study for a masters in television. They soon realized, however, that fashion was their real passion.

Once the images are posted, the site's regulars offer their opinions. "I love it!" one visitor wrote about Picazo. "Though I would find it very difficult to combine that skirt so it doesn't look too smart or too cheap. This girl carries it off brilliantly."

Iniesto, 30, and González, 33, created their gossipy universe at the end of September of last year. It was a way of formalizing what they devoted many an afternoon to doing - sitting in a café and discussing what the other customers or the first person who passed by on the street were wearing.

Less than a year later, they receive between 6,000 and 7,000 visits a day. This week, in order to get a return on the site, they opened a shop selling clothes they have selected from local fashion stores that don't sell their creations online.

The Sartorialist is a US website with a similar idea - snapping people on the street as inspiration to internet fashionistas. The unique philosophy behind Loca por tu ropa's is summed up on the site: "If you end up hypnotized by what people wear and you want to copy it, you are one of us. Everything we see and like, we put up on the web. Not celebs - you make the fashion!"

The venture started out as a blog but grew with the pair's ambition to turn it into a website. Today, it's common to see them in the center of Madrid stopping people, giving them the site's card and then taking photos of them. This is unlike before, when people, like Picazo, were often completely unaware they were having their photo taken.

Back then, the anonymous photos were occasionally problematic. Once, a shop assistant who had been immortalized in a photo on the site with a cigarette in her hand complained because her boss was not happy to see his employees smoking at the store entrance.

This, though, was an exception. "People usually love being praised for their outfits," say the website's owners. Picazo, for example, proudly posted the blog entry about her on Facebook.