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.