From Garance Doré

Given an hour to sift through the Internet’s fashion-oriented ephemera, you might find yourself envying the studied insouciance of wintery Parisienne girls-about-town, as captured by photographer Garance Doré for her eponymous website; anticipating the re-Stephen-Sprouse-ification of Louis Vuitton on Fashionista.com; or – your attention having been directed by the editorial staff at Coolhunting.com – coveting designer Rachel Griffin’s “swing skirt,” an item of clothing that, when implemented properly, transforms any adequately weight-bearing tree branch or scaffold into the wearer’s personal jungle gym. But fashion devotees needn’t stop there. The World Wide Web offers no shortage of sites geared toward scratching the sartorial itch. A comprehensive excavation of the blogosphere yields animated, multi-media fashion shoots (courtesy of Hintmag.com ) a twelve year old, self-proclaimed “style rookie,” whose vocabulary is surpassed only by the avant-garde contents of her wardrobe (tavi-thenewgirlintown.blogspot.com), not to mention Style.com’s exhaustive runway coverage.

“Before it’s in fashion, it’s in Vogue,” goes the venerable monthly’s marketing catchphrase.  But these days, before it’s in Vogue, chances are you’ve seen it at JCreport.com. Make no mistake about it, fashion is fickle, and the Internet is lightening fast. While bastions of print publishing battle the economic downturn, websites with little in the way of overheads, like Refinery29.com and Hintmag continue to thrive, consistently scooping their glossy counterparts. “There’s a greater relevancy,” explains Refinery’s creative director and co-founder, Philippe von Borries. “Magazines work five months ahead of time on one issue. At that point, we’ve already covered it.” Jason Campbell, the man behind the aforementioned JC Report offers that, due to the nature of the medium, “we’re able to make authentic discoveries.” Among his site’s many revelations, Campbell claims to have been the first to cover Giles Deacon and Ricardo Tischi for Givenchy.

JC Report's Jason Campbell

Perhaps most immediately, the saturation of style reportage on the Web has led to the democratization of fashion criticism. “There’s a wide forum for a host of pundits,” says Campbell. Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist, adds, “[on the Internet] it’s so easy and fast to see what’s happening all over the world. I think it’s affecting the talent pool.” He’s speaking not only of young designers frequently overlooked by newsstand titles, but also about rogue journalists and photographers. “If you’re doing something well, people are going to find it,” maintains Schuman, whose image-heavy, street style blog has led to work for print stalwartslike Esquire and GQ. “I think bigger media companies are starting to look at the blogs and realize that these people are generating their own audience and keeping them, which didn’t happen twenty years ago.”

Emerging authorities looking to differentiate themselves from the drone of armchair opinionists often focus on niche coverage. “What’s the point of creating the same kind of magazine online?” asks Campbell, who scours the globe in the service of unearthing diamond-in-the-rough designers in lieu of  “adding my two cents to the chatter surrounding the usual suspects.” For every all-encompassing industry site like Fashionista.com, there’s a Superfuture.com, which offers a cartographer’s-eye-view of nascent shopping destinations like Bejing and Shanghai. Diversity is the order of the day at Unvogue.com; the sleek webzine dedicated its entire holiday issue to an exploration of race and fashion. And the recently relaunched Iconique.com offers fashion editorials as exciting and high-concept as those by established glossies like W, with an eye toward developing new visual talent. Esoteric print publications, too, are expanding their audiences online. Cerebral style magazines like Dossier and The Blow Up are finding a symbiotic forum for their brand of incisive cultural commentary and cutting-edge photo essays via their Web manifestations.

Street Styles from the Sartorialist

All of this changes the way we absorb trends. “A fashion that does not reach the streets is not fashion,” said Coco Chanel, responsible, as it were, for introducing the world of haute couture to the element of practicality. A century (and who knows how many collective hours of Internet browsing) later, and fashion has become a decidedly populist enterprise dressed up in aspirational clothing. So much so that any budding editor can create a lookbook (at Style.com), or conceptualize an entire fashion spread (on the ingenious social networking/shopping hybrid site, Polyvore.com). And of course, home shopping has gone high brow. Thanks to sites like Net-a-porter.com, residents of Madison, Wisconsin can access Alexander Wang as effortlessly as those of Madison Avenue. For those who prefer to conspicuously consume the old fashioned way, Refinery 29 directs its readership to favorite insider boutiques around New York and Los Angeles. “It’s one thing to alert your audience to a given trend,” says von Borries. “It’s another thing to tap them into a local fashion trend in their particular city.” To that end, he and his staff plan on rolling out similarly market-driven sites for San Fransisco and Chicago within the next six months.

With a profile in The New York Times, T magazine under her belt, that verbose twelve year old with a closet full of experimental thrift store finds has risen in the ranks – from “new girl in town” to arbiter of style – faster than H&M can reinterpret Hussein Chalayan. Forget reaching the streets; these days, fashion is as easily realized in the hallways of junior high as it is on the catwalk.