Thinking about beauty yesterday has left me considering the difference in the fashion photoblogs that are on my RSS feed. The Sartorialist favours a very polished style of dress. When he takes photos they tend to be of people who have spent a lot of time perfecting their faces and bodies as well as their clothes. Styleclicker features people who dress far more casually and generally seem less preened. The clothes tend to be more accessible and less expensive. I think I like Hel Looks the most because I'm less likely to actually encounter the style of clothing that is featured on the blog. It has a really Scandinavian focus and that results in a set of photographs that endlessly fascinate me because the shape of the clothes are so unusual in London. I don't think Scandinavian clothing is admired enough or lauded for its difference to the clothes in our part of Europe. I can aspire to the clothes on The Sartorialist because I can't afford them, I can wear the clothes on Styleclicker if I can pull myself together to make my outfit work (and if I bought a proper full length mirror) but when I look at Hel Looks I can see something that seems a bit magical.

The Sartorialist has some beautiful photographs of a jazz age lawn party on his site at the moment. This is my favourite, as it really speaks about the link between female independence and the cut of those dresses that really broke a barrier between male and female attire.

Fashion Hire allows people to hire designer handbags. Primarily this site seems to have been built for people with very specific lifestyles, primarily women who attend events and want to match their accessories to a dress or outfit. It is also a site for people who want to try handbags out before they purchase them and in that sense it's a useful service because these items are incredibly expensive. I'm sure that there is a market for it but I'm unclear as to how large that market is, I have always assumed that a need for handbags, shoes and other accessories was a need that existed mainly for people who like to hoard and keep consumer goods close to them. While handbags of different shapes and sizes are appealing they are not something I've allowed myself to indulge in too thoroughly but part of the reason for that is obvious to me from the website: most designer handbags strike me as ugly and overcomplicated.

There are websites built to sell products, sites that express personal opinion about the industry, critical and positive sites, basically online fashion spans a huge distance in intention. Although I've spent time criticising individual websites I don't attempt to critique the broader approach to fashion as it exists online because it's difficult to get the right initial perspective to even start to do that. The industry has thousands of commentators that come at it from different angles. Take the Sartorialist, his views are expressed mainly through image, his personal taste is definite and the photographs are a compilation of the quirks of style he favours. Many other sites take the same tack, on my RSS feed I have Hel Looks which also has a selection of fashion photos taken on city streets. I favour the site because the style preference translates so well to the medium of photography, Just Glitter Lust is another street snaps website though I don't view it as often.

There is also a big online trend towards taking photos of yourself in clothes that you've bought. Style Bubble features its author regularly as does Kingdom of Style. I don't like the politics of Kingdom of Style very much. Michelle can lean towards a type of criticism of people's bodies that honestly I don't like, mostly because I don't think anyone needs to be an arse about people's imperfections and size. That attitude reeks a bit of living in Photoshop fantasy land. In reality it's impossible to eliminate every poor feature of an organic body but she does point out good design regularly so I keep her on my feed. Fashion and humour, particularly fashion that focuses mainly on pictures and not words doesn't really do humour that isn't cruel and I'd rather just read about outfits. I've cut a lot of bad journalism out of my RSS in the last couple of months, fashion isn't about fame and I don't want to read about a dress just because it's worn by a celebrity. I avoid the Glamour blogs in the US and UK for that reason (and because the writing kind of sucks). If I want to read a gossip column that occasionally comments on frocks I'll go for something so outrageous that it is funny, Perez Hilton basically.

There are the few unique websites that do something completely different, my favourite is Fashion Incubator, it's a good read, enlightening, interesting, actually teaches me something about the fashion industry and the importance of basic skills like pattern cutting. I haven't found anything as relaxed and honest about fashion on the Internet. I also read Kuwait Style because fashion is as interesting globally as it is here, spotting the similarities and differences is fascinating. I intend to write about Ovatus Fashion in the near future.

I would like to read more about fashion theory online but there's a lack of it about I think. Perhaps those just aren't popular sites though so they're more difficult to find.

I'm quite interested in Butcher Couture an ethical fashion company that was founded by Babou Olengha in October 2007. It specialises in organic bovine leather but it's incredibly difficult to get a sense of the clothing online. There are a number of reasons for this, the first is that the website has been written in flash, that means that when you use the label as a search term in google it only picks up the front page and a breast awareness PDF press release. Oddly the site is titled launcher rather than Bucher Couture on google so it's not obvious that you're going to the correct page unless you look at the URL.

The use of flash means that you get an immediate sense of the brand, the marketing aims of the company but not of the products that Butcher Couture is producing. The introduction, as with all flash sites, is long and boring, it takes an age to load up and tells you very little if you are there to look at fashion items. You then have to navigate through more windows until finally you can look at the Autumn/Winter 2007 collection. Whether there is a Spring/Summer 2008 collection cannot be discerned online so it's possible that Butcher Couture no longer exists and is simply a name floating around the Internet. The site isn't finished, the Archive and Track and Trace features do not work, you cannot exit from the equation feature, news is somewhat out of date specifically because the site is a season behind.

This is an honourable idea, it's been branded well and obviously got some attention in the latter half of 2007. Even now the pink wedding dress that Jemma Sykes created for the label is getting some attention online but I can't discover anything about the clothes in a broader sense and that strikes me as odd. The brand, the name, the ethic is interesting but what about the garments, shouldn't they take precedence?

This week I found a flyer for Fashicon in a cafe local to my workplace. Fashicon is a site that sells branded menswear. Its identity is extremely masculine, defined images in quite muted colours with silver buttons that convey the menu visually. Rather than simply relying on the buttons the descriptions (T-shirts/Polo etc.) still sit next to them, making it clear that the buttons are links. That menu structure sits to the right of the page even when you're browsing items. The front page is simple and easy to read, a portal to draw the audience in and make the purpose of the website clear, it doesn't try to sell too much to the customer which is a relief when you're used to flash sites that are poor, time wasting and difficult to navigate. I am never going to buy clothes from Fashicon because I don't buy clothes for men but the experience of the site and discovering the items that it supplies was fulfilling.

The closest women's site that I can think of, off the top of my head, belongs to the high street retailer Oasis. When comparing the two sites it struck me that while Fashicon's homepage was built to allow your vision to be drawn to the menu on the right hand side immediately, the menu was obscured by the fashion illustration on the Oasis site. The last thing that I see is the menu structure and I want to shop using that system. Clearly it is a good site and built along the same, consumer-orientated lines as Fashicon. It's also better than many other fashion sites, one example being the Topshop site which pushes all kinds of nonsense on to you and then mixes up the categories on the left hand side so that even the myriad types of clothing and accessories aren't grouped together.

When I browse clothing online I am not browsing a concept, I want to see what a shop has and where I can go to try it on. Even though I am not an online purchaser I am a scout for clothes that I could potentially buy if they are available. If a site takes too long to navigate and leaves me bored and tapping my fingers while page after page loads I lose respect for the company. Only real concept brands, labels that sell to the very rich, should have flash sites even if they don't sell through their websites. You need to allow people to see the clothes that they could own. Generally fashion as an industry is starting to get the hang of this but even the best sites don't get it quite right, the Oasis website carries your eye from the illustration to the right when you should see the menu structure as an immediate second object. The narrative is wrong but I can't see why.