If you’re a budding fashion maven like me and treat the campus like it’s your personal runway, you would’ve realized two things about Syracuse by now. First, campus fashion isn’t exactly the bee’s knees of style. Second, Carousel Center sucks — this probably explains the former.

But before you give up and turn to leggings and Uggs, there is a solution to cure your fashion addiction: online shopping.

Online shopping, professionally known as e-commerce, is every consumer’s pearly white gates and every company’s money tree. It caters to the everyday shopper but meets the needs of the full-time worker, the college student, the international traveler and anyone else who may not always have the time to mosey around Fifth Avenue.

Traditionally known as a low-end alternative full of fake merchandise, the Internet used to be a place where brands go to die, second to chain department stores. However, with the emergence of websites such as Shopbop, Net-a-Porter, Gilt Groupe and Zappos, e-commerce now has a tremendous stance within the fashion industry.

‘Online sales of luxury goods are expected to rise 20 percent worldwide this year, double the rate of increase in the overall market,’ according to the consulting firm Bain in an article published in The New York Times on Nov. 21.

Luxury brands themselves are also staging a presence on the Internet by relying on their own e-commerce initiatives rather than on the websites previously mentioned. The most recent brands to start their own shopping section on their websites include Marc Jacobs in September and Stella McCartney in the United Kingdom just two days ago.

Even websites not associated with fashion, such as Amazon, eBay and Google, are now jumping on the e-commerce wagon and targeting a more fashionably forward audience, which brings me to the next phenomenon in online shopping: Cyber Monday.

For those who are unfamiliar with Cyber Monday, it takes place annually on the Monday after Black Friday, aka the biggest shopping day of the year. Cyber Monday has been growing at a tremendous rate within the fashion industry, and according to the National Retail Federation there’s been so much support for this newfound shopping day that about 88 percent of online retailers offered sales this past weekend.

Further, ‘an estimated 107 million shoppers went online on Cyber Monday, capping a five-day spending spree that raised retailers’ hopes that consumers would deliver the best holiday season in four years,’ according to an article published in the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 30.

Whether it’s the need to keep up with sales, the push toward global integration or the creation of the best Monday ever, e-commerce is the present and the future. The Internet is no longer a place of bootleg goods but a place where it can connect brands with people of different cultures, incomes and styles all over the world.

Either way you slice it, e-commerce is a global and integral part of fashion. It’s only the beginning steps of keeping up with this fast-paced business, and the fashion industry accepts it with open, well-accessorized arms.

Vicki Ho is a senior public relations major. Her column appears every Wednesday, and she can be reached at vho@syr.edu.

 

Published on November 30, 2010 at 12:00 pm