14 January 2010 - 10:55Why is fashion on the Web so blah?

Check out the sites of the hippest fashion labels and you’ll find almost no appreciation for the potential of digital artistry. No video that might illuminate the creative process, no animation, no design gestures that is consistent with the contemporary spirit of these brands. Instead, what you chiefly get is a recap of the last collection; some stills images from advertising and a selection of items for sale. Very uninspired.

The designers and their fashion houses rule the runway and provide much of the creative juice for the fashion magazines but have been surprisingly absent in providing the same level of artistic vision to their Web sites.

Selling online is not the issue—that’s happening by the mega megabyte full. Rather, it is that designers and fashion chiefs, the very people who are supposed to predict the future and show us what it will look like, can’t seem to grasp the most important platform of the present: the Web. The online creative environment seems ideal for them, innovation is exploding, censorship is nonexistent, and there are no time constraints, all the things creative people could want. Musicians have embraced it. So have graphic designers, photographers, writers, and animators. In fact the World Wide Web provides a wide-open frontier where the cutting edge of culture should flourish.

As more and more fashion events and opinion and comment unfold in real time, top houses and their creative captains are in danger of appearing to lag behind. Lately, though, there have some been signs of movement. Many houses have put a toe in social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and a few designers including Alexander McQueen, tweet themselves or write blogs. But fashion is visual and voyeuristic and that titillation is not satisfied with tweets. Besides, some efforts by fashion houses to engage fans through social media feel awkward and forced-as though they were told to do this rather than they really want to.

There remains a gulf between what digital media can achieve for a luxury brand and what its executives can understand and then confidently support. Many houses are used to operating with “a fortress mentality” and don’t know how to deal with audience participation. As for notions like blogs, or thinking of a site as a community, or as a publishing vehicle, these seem to elude fashion brands.

Top fashion houses are all about control of the brand, which is totally antithetical to the ethos of the Web,

This seems to us a key reason for the slow pace of creativity online by fashions cognoscenti. Fashion designers have total control in their domain but it’s a cloistered world and maybe it’s too predictable. The forms of expression and the tools they use have grown stale. Maybe they need a shake up, a wake up call that the power to influence is passing them by. We suggest spending an hour on uniqlo.com and see how this retailer thinks creatively and makes fashion really, really cool online.