Fashion — as the saying goes — never goes out of style, and that basic idea is bringing a rush of investment to online startups that want to hook into the colliding worlds of clothing and consumerism with an engaging social twist. One of the latest is Chicisimo – a social media site for fashionistas to post and vote on pictures of their latest looks, and then buy the look for themselves — which today is announcing that it’s picked up a seed round of $800,000 from a list of angel investors including VitaminaK, a backer of another e-commerce upstart, Alice.com.

The news comes as Spain-based Chicisimo exists a long stint in beta mode, which saw the site over the last two years expand to cover seven languages — Italian, German, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and English.

Chicisimo — Spanish for “super chic” — is playing on two ideas that are very trendy at the moment: the surge in consumers looking for visually-driven fashion content online, spearheaded by sites like Pinterest and the Fancy, but also many smaller players focused specifically on clothes; and the rise of e-commerce sites driven by social recommendations and curation — which at its heart is a big data/algorithm play.

In addition to posting pictures of outfits, users can vote for those it likes the most; share the looks they like on sites like Pinterest, and even buy related items. It also lets brands design their own “flower” badges, which get awarded to users who wear those brands the most. In addition to organising looks by users, you can also search by designers, most popular trends and specific articles of clothing (eg “jackets”).

Chicisimo’s tagline is “real fashion on real people,” and the idea is that the content is generated by everyday female users. But like a lot in the fashion industry, that idea on first glance seems like somewhat of an illusion: just about all the women are long and slim, and the pictures don’t exactly look like snapshots.

This is actually one of the unique selling points on the site and points to how Chicisimo may develop its business in the long run. Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarría, who co-founded Chicisimo with his wife, notes that the “high-caliber community of fashion-forward women” who post “hundreds of artistic photos” daily make this site attractive not only for other fashionistas (including some who are perhaps not as stunning), but for the wider industry, which can use the site’s ranking systems “to see which brands and items their customers are actually wearing (and not just buying).”

Chicisimo knows that it’s in a very crowded space, and so it will be using its angel funding to drive more users to its sites in a bid to scale up. (We’ve reached out to the site to get some more details on current users; we’ll update when we learn more. We’re also interested to know if those are really user-generated pictures on the site.) From today it’s also launching a few new features to help further engagement: these include the ability to create sets of clippings around particular trends; and a new recommendation tool, “New Idea to Wear, Each Day.” These will be chosen from those user-generated clipped sets and will focus on a new trend every day.