Fashion Net is a fashion

Fashion

Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear, or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a person...

-specific search engine and guide aimed at style conscious consumers. It was founded by Stig Harder

Stig Harder

Stig Harder is the founder of Fashion Net, Lumiere Magazine, The Vegalitarian Society, and Holofono. Born in Flekkefjord, Norway, he graduated from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, in 1991.- Internet :...

 in 1994 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

. Now headquartered in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, the site is available in English, Spanish and Japanese.
Launched in January 1995, Fashion Net was Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

's first fashion site and as such helped motivate the fashion industry to go online.

Internet in the mid 1990s

In the mid 1990s, the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 was still largely a research network populated by academics. But the strong appeal of this entirely new medium was made evident by the pioneering

Innovator

An innovator in a general sense, is a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality something better than before. That often opens up a new area for others and achieves an innovation.-History:...

 efforts of fashion's early online entrants and the quick adoption by both independent and established fashion publishers, designers and visual artists

Visual arts

The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...

 soon followed. Fashion Net launched on the internet in January 1995, making it the first commercial fashion site on the net. As Nick Knight

Nick Knight

Nicholas Verity Knight is a former England cricketer. Knight's middle name was in honour of the 1930s English Test bowler Hedley Verity who was killed in World War II and is a distant family relation...

 — possibly the very first fashion photographer

Fashion photography

Fashion photography is a genre of photography devoted to displaying clothing and other fashion items. Fashion photography is most often conducted for advertisements or fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, or Elle...

 to embrace the Internet — succinctly put it, it showed great potential over "yet another glossy picture in a magazine."

Traffic

As of late 2006, fashion.net's userbase was 1.2 million per month. Fashion Net's reach is evidenced by its position on major search engine

Search engine

A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...

s; when searching for 'fashion,' fashion.net is the number one search result on Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com

Ask.com

Ask is a Q&A focused search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine...

, Alta Vista, Hotbot

HotBot

HotBot is a web search engine launched in May 1996 by Wired Magazine. It is currently owned by Lycos. HotBot became a popular tool with search results served by the Inktomi database and directory results provided originally by LookSmart and then the Open Directory Project since mid-1999...

, MSN

MSN

MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its...

, and Lycos

Lycos

Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...

.