I'm starting a short blog series called "Crystal Ball" to share my perspectives on fashion and where the industry is heading.  I would love any feedback and comments on my little thought bubbles. 

It was a shock to me when I started my first job out of college in 2007 and learned that clothing brands take orders by... writing them on paper and faxing them!  This was right before the economic meltdown and all that jazz so the contemporary market was hot.  We were placing orders left and right, and re-ordering up the wazoo... and my job was to organize all the paper and call people to confirm orders and shipments and take pictures of all the stuff because we didn't trust the re-touched images that vendors gave us.  It was so bizarre to me that something like shopbop.com could exist, with their 200 something brands, free shipping, and glorious lookbooks- and amazon.com (the parent company of shopbop) with their one-click shipping that they tried to patent in the early days of the internet, infinite order history with little thumbnails, and free two-day shipping.  And yet, I was still working with paper at work.  When I came on board, they had just converted from using Polaroids to digital cameras. Yeah, you heard me.  I bought my first 1.0 megapixel digital camera at least in 2003 (if not before) but they were still using POLAROIDS.... I just don't have any more words to explain the ass backwardness of the fashion world in terms of technology.

Though fashion is creatively forward, it is technologically behind.  In part, this is probably due to the history of the garment district and its dominance by immigrants and dependency on manufacturing.  I can say this because my parents are immigrants and I didn't even become an American citizen until I was 13.  (Both of my parents now text and email.. in broken English).  So now, 10+ years after the internet was invented, and after I max out all of my credit cards to create monalisastyle.com do I see industry people making the connection between the internet and how it can help their sales and evangelize their brand name.  Brands only jumped on the social media/ twitter bandwagon in the last couple of months or so.  Many of them don't even have Facebook Fan Pages.  Heck, brands only started getting feedback from their customers to see what they want and are willing to buy! 

Does it make sense for designers to spend upwards of $100,000 twice a year to put on a 20 minute fashion show during Fashion Week in NYC... especially if you're in your first 2 seasons?  Why not go the forward-thinking and business savvy route as Alexander McQueen has?  Soon after Ralph Lauren't Polo brand announced it would be having an online fashion show, Time Magazine wrote a great article titled, "Will Fashion's Biggest Names Kiss the Runway Goodbye?"  By going virtual, you can show your collection not only to 750 industry insiders and press but also to millions of consumers who might not be able to afford your runway clothing but might buy your line for Target.  Done correctly and on the proper timeline, viewers should even be able to pre-order or order styles right on the same screen that is showing the online fashion show.  I agree with Donna Karan when she says that fashion should be marketed closer to the delivery date rather than 6 months in advance (WWD CEO Summit 2009).  All of the hype dies down by the time the runway styles hit the selling floor.

The older corporate executives probably don't want to hire some Gen Y'er to head up social media because "people don't trust the internet."  This leads to the next post in the Crystal Ball series titled, "demise of department stores for fashion and rise of boutique shops and I can even take that further into the longest running sentence ever to decline of corporations and rise of the freelancers, independents, and the creative class".  The world is resetting itself - what was once big and stable (corporations) no longer are and people are reverting to depending on themselves and community (Etsy.com is a great example of this as are shared office spaces)  Who are the next generation of consumers and employees?  How will the world change?