Uniqlo, the Japanese clothes giant, may have just turned the fast fashion shopping world upside down this week with the launch of is new online shopping site in the U.S. This may not seem like important news to many, but to a certain American consumer—think very well-dressed, without much money, and living between the coasts—it is like a food drop from a Marshall Plan plane in 1940s Berlin. $9.90 slim jeans and $79.90 cashmere sweaters in wearable solids are no longer the special privilege of New Yorkers and Los Angelenos, who, let’s face it, probably didn’t really need more slim-cut cheap clothes anyway. The only people who might be disappointed are the ones who used to pick up cash making runs to the coastal stores and sending the loot to Uniqlo fanatics in the middle states.
This is important news for fashionistas who live in towns that don't have a H&M or Zara store.
Internationally, Uniqlo has repositioned itself as a stylish alternative for the mass market, and the website works accordingly. Like Uniqlo’s stores, the site is elegantly and cleverly designed, with minimalist care. It also mimics the feeling of plenty that makes the stores so mesmerizing. Inside the Fifth Avenue headquarters in New York, neatly folded jeans and T-shirts in mostly solid colors line the walls. The store is so deep that one almost falls into it, and then has to fight one’s way out by grabbing T-shirts that are too cheap to pass up.
Along these lines, the website is set up more like a Pinterest site or a Tumblr blog. Where an old-fashioned online apparel site might replicate a catalog (frustratingly, to anyone who has ever had to position their mouse over the tiny page numbers at the bottom, or chosen, for the millionth time, “view all”).