le t shirt. Deliveries can now be made world wide, but the only way you can buy these clothes is online, there are no stores anywhere. The models are not the contemporary ones we see now gliding down the runway, these ones are tattooed long fringed boys and platinum blond extensioned girls with serious piercings and tattoos. Fashion Boudoir is also somewhere most fashion students would want to stop off at on their travels around the Myspace community (www.myspace.com/fashionboudoir) . It features links to fashion magazines, fashion houses and has competitions for clothing and accessory companies like Doctor Martens to pluck budding young designers out of the rough over the internet. Fashion stylist Richard Shoymei was thrust into the fashion limelight through myspace because he became an “internet celebrity” which attracted the likes of Japanese and Italian Vogue to his doorstep. “They are essentially buying into me as a person as well as a talent, which all comes from my celebrity status on MySpace. “I feel in order to expand as a brand it’s important to reach out to all; everyone who expressed interest in me is important in my eyes,” Shoyemi said. In Feburary 2007, IQONs emerged and was quickly dubbed the “Myspace of fashion”. Its purpose being to do for fashion what Myspace has done for music. Founded by Rafael Jimenez and Suran Goonatilake: “We created Iqons because we wanted to use the existing social networking phenomenon in order to help people show their work, share it with others and create new networks based on merit and integrity regardless of where people live or who they know, through Iqons they will be able to get visibility, find new opportunities, exchange information and more.This can hopefully help to discover and encourage new talent.”Rafael worked previously with avant-garde fashion house Comme des Garcons which led to the birth of many Guerilla stores. The stores would be opened for a year in unusual locations and would be run by people who would have had no experience in retail. This was to break the mould of the smart, polished shops you usually associate with fashion stores. Suran is the chairman and cofounder of Bodymetrics, a company that specialise in creating systems that scan and map out the body. The purpose of this is to get the right fitting clothes and measurements. Whereas on Myspace you have a friends list, your friends list on IQONs is aptly labelled as “entourage”. The idea of IQONs is that you can create a profile to showcase your fashion talents be it hairdressing, makeup artistry, design or illustration. You can advertise your shows, exhibitions and where you could be showing your work, easily over the IQONs with a few clicks of a button. IQONs would seem to make it easier to break into the world of fashion but it obviously increases the competition to get into the industry that’s so hard to break. Companies are turning to the fashion based social networking websites to get help with their designs. Iqons are currently in co operation with Nike and have a page on the website asking people to design a new trainer. They give you a template and you have to go edit the shoe and design parts for it. You then upload it back up onto the website and people rate your work. The person with the highest rating gets their design made into a shoe and sold to the masses via the high street. Many fashion houses are easily found on IQONs, Galliano, Westwood, Balenciaga, Versace and Giles Deacon. These same people can also be located easily among the masses on Facebook. Share Your Look is another social networking website that focuses not just on fashion designers etc, but instead is more open to different types of women and men that may have no keen interest in fashion, but enjoy showing off their clothes. You upload pictures of yourself in a certain outfit, and people rate that outfit and leave comments. However, one of the cons of this website is that people can be, like the industry, too harsh in their critique of other people. The website claims that they are an online community for “fashion addicts, trend setters and fashion designers to share their look over the world”. Going through the pages you get a different range of people, from teenage boys to the fashionistas in their 5os, people from different countries, even from countries that are not often associated with fashion. For example Croatia and Singapore. One pro of this website is that it offers a view of fashion from many different points of view and it’s interesting to see trends that are on display in the different countries

Osoyou.com is parallel to Share Your Look in the ideas of being for “women” to share their fashion looks, fashion passions and desires but the thing that Osoyou possess that puts Share Your Look in the dark is that you have access to your very own online High Street consisting of retail shops like Miss Selfridge, Marks and Spencers and La Redoute so you can buy stuff to add to your look online. People also can see the things you have bought also and can comment on your choice of buys, slating it or rating it. But how exactly do and will these websites, that have become the hub of the UK culture impact the world of fashion? I think the fashion market and industry will increase with the amount of designers, fashion writers, models etc which may squeeze out the more established fashion houses like Dior, Chanel and Gucci in favour of all these more young, fresh designers. Or it may lead to toughening up in the industry and only the super talented can get into the high fashion wardrobe as it were. New types of clotheswear also might start to emerge. Myspace has invented new terms for types of music that you can search for on the website, new ones include “toystep” (using childrens plastic toys) and power pop ( a mixture of rock, op and nurave) and the same could easily occur in the fashion world. But one things for sure, the world of internet and fashion colliding, means that profits will probably go up on the increase seeing as the ecomerce marker is expected to reach £60 billion by 2012. People are more interested in shopping from the comfort of their own home seeing as the high street can be extremely stressful and queues are cited as a big turn off for shoppers; and also they get better choice over the internet. This whole manifesto is most definitely going to make a boom in the online shopping community, which in turn, could lead to shops having to close down stores, and start having warehouses! Soon though, the fitting room, may well become extinct.