Hardly a day’s gone by without the news of a fashion company announcing some new web initiatives, iPhone or Android applications, and other online projects. Fashion houses are now racing at light speed to catch up with the Internet revolution by establishing e-commerce, editorial websites, Twitters, Facebooks, YouTubes et al. Five years ago, Prada initiated the entry into the cell phone business with its own branded phone and Dolce & Gabbana quickly followed; last October, Gucci broadcast a 24-hour music channel on its iPhone app; Chanel just launched its own web magazine and LVMH followed with its own content site NOWness.com. The fall 2010 fashion season is the first on record that nearly all the shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris will be streamed live on the Internet.

    Fashion is about change, innovation, and invention. In the 1990s, there was a period when fashion shows first started airing on cable television; most of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s shows in Paris were broadcast live on the paid cable channel Paris Première. We all cheered such endeavors then, not only for their implications—expanding fashion’s reach beyond the industry and the fashionistas—but for our own egoism as well. A live broadcast at 8 p.m. ensured that the show would commence on time, an impossible feat prior, so that we could get to our 9 p.m. dinner reservations.  
    Cable was the precursor to the current Internet streaming craze. As technology has advanced in the last decade to contain the capacity for high definition transmissions, and with the saturation of personal computers and the explosion of websites, fashion companies, which lagged behind in accessing this competitive online environment, are now just catching up. With streaming, fashion has gone democratic in the way pornography did a decade earlier.    
    Without a doubt, the Internet is bridging the gap between the designer and the consumer. Any individual can participate in the once limited-access world of fashion via blogging, comments on social web pages, or tweeting and re-tweeting. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have been at the forefront of this exchange where the “talk” and ideas flow both ways. Dolce & Gabbana started livestreaming its show a few seasons back, but this season the designers made a reality documentary called “The Pre-Show Diaries” to stream on YouTube the day of their fashion show. Robert Duffy, the president of Marc Jacobs International, is now a devoted fan of Twitter and Mr. Jacobs has been active on his own Facebook page for several years now.
    It’s hard to say when the first livestreamed fashion show was, but for his men’s fall show in February 2000 at the tents in Bryant Park, Kenneth Cole collaborated with Digital Island, a large Internet media company specializing in content delivery, hosting, and networking, to encode the video signal of the show for live broadcasting on the brand’s website. The fashion show served to launch Mr. Cole’s efforts to collect 250,000 used shoes at his retail stores nationwide to donate to HELP USA, an organization helping the homeless. By utilizing Digital Island’s advanced streaming capabilities and satellite uplink, Mr. Cole brought his venture to a broader public, for philanthropic purposes as well as commercial.
    Working together with the photographer Nick Knight and SHOWstudio, Alexander McQueen upped the webcast ante by tailoring what was his final women’s show—“Plato’s Atlantis”—specifically for a streaming broadcast. The designer created a reflective runway set with three large moving cameras to capture every angle of the models’ procession like those bird’s-eye view cameras at sporting events. On each side, and at the back of the runway, were monitors so that the audience could watch the show and themselves on screen. The show went live at 8:15 p.m. in Paris last October 6th. Adding to the frenzy was Lady Gaga tweeting about the new song she created for the show. Five minutes into the broadcast, the site crashed due to overwhelming hits. Soon, other labels followed suit: last month, Burberry screened its women’s fall show at special screening venues in five cities in 3-D (complete with Burberry 3-D eyewear), complemented by a 2-D stream on over 73 sites simulcast concurrently with the show in London.
    I had never seen a live streaming until the afternoon of February 18th when I logged onto Facebook to view the Calvin Klein women’s collection show at 3 p.m. Because I was going to the second show at 4 p.m., I wanted to see what I could learn by comparing the two modes of viewing. Just a little after 3:30 p.m., I watched from my computer as the darkened room lit up with flashing spotlights. Down the runway came Jac Jagaciak in a long-sleeve, boxy, knee-length, black satin dress, and leather boots. The camera followed her to the next turn, around the seated audience, a style of filming that continued to the finale. I noted well the model Kristen McMenamy with silver cropped hair wearing a shiny black double-breasted coatdress. The experience was imperfect; the transmission froze at times due to the amount of people logged on to the site.
    But less than an hour later, I was watching the real life Kristen McMenamy taking a right turn from the photographer’s pit, heading right to the section where I was sitting. She had a presence about how she wore that black coatdress that moved slightly as she walked, and her eyes would sometimes glance into the overhead camera as if she was spot-checking herself. It confirmed something I had suspected all along: that the experience of fashion live is radically different from a streamed experience. How else could one palpably feel the subtlety of Francisco Costa’s design, the long black satin dress that flared like small bubbles at the knees in the back, letting the model walk with ease?  
    It matters a great deal how we experience fashion. A more critical question to ask is how fashion on the web will shape the view and experiences of a new generation of people growing up in 2-D—if and how the substitution of real life feelings and gestures for the disposability of online video will transpire. I don’t know the answer. When I was a little kid, there was a commercial for a new chrome cassette tape that had the power to record then replay every subtle sound, supposedly indistinguishable from the real thing.  “Is it live or is it Memorex?” read the tag line of the advertisement. But will we ever really not know the difference?
    As we tweet and stream ourselves into the forever now, we need to realize that fashion is about pleasure and sexuality. That’s something we cannot get from logging on where there is only information in 2-D, or soon, digital 3-D. Fashion is a human experience. After seeing the Prada fall show stream live, I emailed a friend who works for the house in Milan to say I had just seen the show. Pausing for a minute, I sent another email saying that I felt sorry I had missed seeing a great show.