Fashion Is Two Clicks Behind

By CATHY HORYN

IN 1920 the French dressmaker Gabrielle Chanel put a number on a bottle of perfume. The idea would have appealed to her for several reasons, not least that numbers celebrated logic and in some ways the defeat of romanticism following World War I. Numbers also represented the success of new forms of expression, namely Cubism, with its reduction of objects to basic geometric forms, an idea that Chanel pursued in fashion. Whatever the reason, the public sensed it was getting something new and different. Chanel No. 5 has remained one of the world's top-selling perfumes.

Let's suppose that Chanel were alive today and just starting out. What would she do to drum up sales for her frocks? Embed them in an episode of "Desperate Housewives?" Lend one to Kiera Knightley for the Golden Globes? Somehow these options seem unworthy of an iconoclast, although many designers are willing to believe without much proof that such efforts translate into business.

Chanel, I suspect, would not be so complacent. She would turn a tendency to lie into an advantage. She would have a reality show, casting her lovers in supporting roles.

Through her blog, CocoDope.com, she would not only acquire a dedicated audience, but she would also understand that she had lost her customers by the time the sales racks of Saks or the worthy pages of Vogue could carry her name into the heartland. She would realize, above all, that to be an iconoclast in 2006 she would have to think of Web technology not merely as a marketing and selling tool but also as the primary form of expression in her time.

As another runway season approaches, journalists and buyers seem increasingly prepared to be bored. The usual explanation is that the 1970's model of selling clothes through a combination of personality, runway shows and brick-and-mortar stores is exhausted. Also, there are too many designers chasing the same diminishing media and retail space, and operating under a fatal belief that they will have time to develop their brands.

In the course of reporting on the unlikely emergence of Donald J. Trump as a fashion seer, I asked Zac Posen, who seems the hippest of the young designers, what Mr. Trump's fashion experience told him about American consumers. He replied that it was important to focus on quality and building a brand for the long term.

I hope Mr. Posen has more up his sleeve than that. It's hard to imagine what meaning the long term has to a girl in Berlin creating a video podcast so that a guy in Brooklyn can download it on his iPod. Another thing: the greatest challenge facing makers of luxury goods, after new technology, is the loss of textile and apparel manufacturing jobs in Europe and America. It has made clothes still produced there horribly expensive. If an absolute faith in the long term doesn't make you irrelevant these days, a $2,000 jacket will.

But the real reason for the growing sense of boredom is that the fashion world is not participating in the technology revolution. It is outside the medium rather than inside it. The discouraging thing about watching models flip down the runway is that it doesn't allow you to look at and think about fashion in a new way. It's the same aesthetic trip, and the Web has widened our emotional and aesthetic expectations.

Jeff Jarvis, on his blog, BuzzMachine, has said, "The essence of media in the future is not just content and not distribution, but relationships." The Web is actually proof of just how out of touch most designers are. Tom Ford, who was considered a great communicator at Gucci and is now attempting to make movies and get back into fashion, does not even have a Web site. A blog? A podcast? I can't think of a designer who has one. (Admittedly, not many designers have the time, what with the demands of collections, stores, magazines and dressing celebrities.)

Most fashion companies have Web sites - Gucci has a very good one, with transactional capabilities - and with a prod from shopping sites like Net-a-porter.com and Bluenile.com have mastered their skepticism about selling expensive things online.

But the challenge goes beyond e-commerce. In all the online and offline discussions about developments in technology - in particular, the creation of interrelated Web and television programming (the aim of companies like Brightcove) - no fashion company is mentioned as a possible participant. Yet with 58 percent of American households equipped with broadband - and 46 percent of those households having annual incomes greater than $75,000 - luxury-goods companies like Gucci can't afford not to think how they might use their visual knowledge to get involved.

And Net providers ought to listen. Fashion houses, with their ability to sell sex and glamour, might just provide a key piece of the puzzle: how to make online programming pay.

Instead of doing runway shows and being handmaidens to Hollywood, maybe it's time designers turned the Web into their theater of dreams and let the Lindsay Lohans of the world dress themselves.

Although people seem to want sophisticated content online, entertainment and Web research executives I spoke to agree that much of it is pretty atrocious. One problem, a talent agent in Los Angeles said, is there's little financial incentive for writers and directors to create original content for the Web when feature films pay far more. Adding to production costs are the fees that more and more actors demand for flogging a car or a soft drink that appears in a movie or television show. And a television producer in New York told me that while he now spends a lot of time thinking of ways to combine entertainment with shopping, there are concerns about who would hold and manage the inventory.

Here are a couple of pitches:

I think Mr. Posen should do a next-generation reality show - in other words, not a competitive one - that would be centered around his friends in New York and would allow viewers to order his clothes directly.

I am less interested in Mr. Posen as a designer (and, frankly, less convinced of his talent) than in his exceptional ability to relate to people. He is one of those New Yorkers who has been networking since the age of 3. And the women in his circle, like the Schnabel sisters, are fascinating themselves and would help sell his clothes. Of course they might want a cut.

A year ago, while in Los Angeles to interview Mr. Ford about his life after Gucci, I said he ought to forget about directing feature films and instead make high-class porn movies with the sparkling dialogue of Billy Wilder. My thought was that Mr. Ford, with his clear aesthetic and record at Gucci, was just the person to legitimize porn (or at least take the grime off it) and that women would watch something that blended explicit sex with great clothes and sophisticated humor.

Mr. Ford looked at me blankly. "Do women want to laugh when they're watching sex?" he asked.

Uh, yeah.

I haven't changed my thinking, just refined it. As the television producer in New York suggested to me, entertainment that attempts to involve a shopping opportunity needs to fulfill two missions: There must be a compelling story line, and you have to resolve the problem of inventory.

I think Mr. Ford ought to create a six-part series for the Web, to be offered through subscription, telling the story of three women who arrive in Los Angeles from Nowheresville. (Hey, keep it simple. Make the dialogue rich and Wilder.) Each video segment would be 30 minutes long, with a 30-second commercial in front of it.

As for the inventory he could use the fashion industry's great material weapon: exclusivity. In one scene, for instance, a character could have on a fabulous suit and in another a sexy pair of jeans. Both styles would be designed by Mr. Ford and offered for immediate online sale. But because he might cut only 300 units of a $3,000 suit and, say, 3,000 units of a $200 pair of jeans, he can offer exclusivity while managing his inventory.

And since in my scheme Mr. Ford owns the company and has slipped behind the wall of mystery and privacy, never to give another silly interview again, he has the opportunity for the second time in his career to make us look at fashion differently.

I think I'm going to find the next round of shows very distracting as I sit there, thinking far, far away, of the exploits that I might be downloading into my video iPod.