Web is fashion central: Style-conscious can go online for tips on looking good
This is the time of year that Montreal women enjoy digging into their wardrobes and putting on the clothes that have been hiding for the past six months. This is a fashion conscious city. The warm weather brings out Montreal women’s natural creativity, expressed in their clothes.
Montreal men are a happy audience. But you don’t have to wait for nice weather to check out the latest styles. Take a stroll on the Web any time and you can peruse some of the vast selection of fashionable Web sites.
Women like to find out about what’s hot and what’s cool in fashion magazines, and there are many on the Web. Some sites are produced by print publications, and others are strictly online.
Fashion Icon Inc. is a New York media company which seems to have its fingers in all kinds of apparel pies. They prepare fashion shows and design Web sites.
Their Web site (www.fashion-icon.com) has a little shopping arcade where you can buy some fairly low-end T-shirts. A section called The Bare Minimum has profiles of designers, with questions and answers that let you see how the trendsetters are thinking about clothes.
The Latest News section has pictorials of New York boutiques, designers and fashion shows.
Elle magazine (www.elle.com) is one of the most popular fashion magazines, and the Web site has plenty of traffic. You can read some interesting female interest stories here, like “What’s it like to date a hunk from Down Under?”
There are always articles about how to dress in various circumstances, with images.
Elle has a number of international editions, with local stories and designs, and there are links to these Web sites, including the Elle Quebec site at http://elle-quebec.infinit.net.
Other good fashion magazines on the World Wide Web include World of Style, found at http://homearts.com/depts/style/00dpstc1.htm, with lots of interesting images and articles like Trends ’98; Fashion Planet, (www.fashion-planet.com) with high-end nifty clothes and Fashion UK (www.widemedia.com/fashionuk) which is a British fashion zine with lots of low-end nifty clothes.
About 50 per cent of the $80 billion U.S. in annual catalogue sales south of the border is spent on apparel. These are big numbers. Obviously many people are willing to buy clothes without actually touching the fabric, or trying them on, first. Over time, the Web may inherit the catalogue business, and there are already a number of interesting places to shop for clothes online.
One good-looking site is Fashionmall.com (ww.fashionmall.com) which launched on July 5, 1995, one of the first fashion sites on the Web. Ben Nasarin, the founder, was a partner in a men’s sportswear company before he started this business. His father is an assistant VP at IBM, so Nasarin had technology in the blood.
The site hosts a number of fashion magazines, like Fashion Reporter, that make for interesting reading.
Fashionmall.com also specializes in famous designers, including Charles Jourdan, Givenchy, Tommy Hilfiger, Giorgio Armani, and Jean Paul Gaultier, among others.
Each designer has a section where you can see a few of their items (this time of year, they’re showing off their sunglasses collections). They don’t sell directly through the site, but you can see a list of their retail outlets.
Fashionmall.com does sell other clothes online. They have a collection of 17 different online fashion stores that sell everything from shoes to scarves.
There are more than just women’s fashion sites out there, of course. Men and children have to dress too, and there are many fashion sites for them.
The Kids Fashion Network (www.kfn.com) is a great directory of fashion sites for children. There are links to dozens of kid’s clothing manufacturer sites. The sites are filed in different categories and in an alphabetical list.
Kid’s Fashion Network has links to companies from around the world, though most are American. You can find companies in Colorado that manufacture cowboy outfits for kids, and companies in Australia that make UV protective clothes. It’s an interesting selection, a good place to go if you want to make sure your kid is stylish.