Indonesian fashion available on the Net

Indonesian fashion available on the Net

By Izabel Deuff

JAKARTA (JP): More information about fashion in Indonesia is
now available on the Internet, thanks to the initiative of
Indotex La Salle International College.

The website (www.sistelindo.net.id/lasalle) was launched
recently in celebration of the school's first anniversary.

The college, one of two international fashion schools in
Indonesia -- the other one is Esmod -- is part of the LaSalle
International College Group, which is already open in 12 cities
in Asia, Europe and North America.

In creating the website, Indotex Lasalle College aims at
providing foreign designers or producers with information about
Indonesia's textile industry.

Indotex's director, Jean Giguere, said: "We want to develop
trade between Indonesia and foreign countries."

Taruna K. Kusmayadi, the international director of the
Association of Indonesian Fashion Designers and Manufactures
(APPMI) agreed: "I think it is a great means to have some
information about textiles, to find out about announcements or
advertisements and above all, to get in touch with outsiders."

Once on Indotex's website, users are invited to click one of
two icons. One icon contains information about the school, and
the other one, the Indotex LaSalle Documentation Center, provides
general information about fashions and textiles.

The Jakarta school offers five programs: Fashion Design,
Fashion Marketing, Apparel Production Management, Computer
Graphics/Graphic Design and Business Administration. Each program
has its own link, giving career prospects, names of courses and
hours. Also available is information on services and facilities
provided by Indotex LaSalle to its students and about other
LaSalle Schools.

The second part of the site is an open door to the school's
Documentation Center. Nearly every page shows a room and gives
news you can get on it. In reality, those four rooms feature a
collection of fabrics along with their photographs.

"In the Indonesian Fabric Collection, you can have samples of
Indonesia's current products, made by hundreds of different
producers, of woven and knitted fabrics," said Giguere.

"If you want to know about the different histories and
cultures, you may check with the Historical and Cultural Fabric
Collection," he added. This room presents an important overview
of the garments inherited from many regions in Indonesia.

The third room, the Dupont Fabric Room -- Lycra Registered
Innovation Center, is a library of fabrics from different parts
of the world containing lycra.

The last page presents the IBM Internet Center. The real room
is connected to the Internet and provides access to the IBM
Global Network for Styles and Trends Worldwide Research. You can
be connected to six fashion links from this page.

Until now, the Indotex La Salle College site has been mostly a
promotional site because it gives written data on the school
without enabling people to get more in-depth information.

Giguere explained that all the data won't be computerized
because of the expensive costs. People who are interested must
physically go to Indotex LaSalle College, in the Jakarta
Fairground, Kemayoran, Central Jakarta.

The Indotex site is the first found on the Internet to gather
information on Indonesian fashion. Some newspapers deliver some
data in their sites and a few Indonesian textile companies have
their own homepages. Other general websites -- such as
www.indopro.com -- provide users with information on Indonesia's
industry will give lists of Indonesian textile manufacturers.

Accordingly, it has saved four pages for a list of Indonesian
designers, textile manufacturers, garment manufacturers and
associations. It has information on names, addresses, phone
numbers and facsimile numbers for 2,258 entities. Unfortunately,
e-mail addresses are absent from the list.

According to Giguere, most firms and designers on the list did
not have an e-mail address.

The Indotex website can seem insignificant compared to one by
Fashion Institute Design and Merchandising, a two-year-old school
based in the U.S. Users can find, among other things, archives,
galleries and exhibits of garments, and can be connected to many
fashion-related sites, in its impressive homepage (www.fidm.com).

It seems the Indotex website needs more work. A search engine
and faster speed is required.

It is planned that in the future, the site would provide
designs, to encourage people to get samples or buy products but
until then, the response from designers has not substantial.

Taruna said that APPMI has been offered to do this but it
hasn't finished collecting all the data yet.

"We have to know product capacity, local markets and export
figures before submitting data," he said.

The director of Indotex LaSalle College is definitively
convinced of the future of the Internet and its assets.
Hopefully, this new Indonesian venture will also appeal to local
and foreign designers and manufacturers.