When I was younger, fashion didn't seem very important, but now I know how fleeting life is, the fact that millions of people are obsessing over hemlines and fabrics and colour palettes is a strangely comforting piece of the human dance. At first glance, the defiantly analogue world of fashion seems far away from digital technology, but look again: the web is great at bringing people together, and moving information around quickly, so it's perfect for the rapid-fire exchange of memes you need in fashion.

The ability to fax designs to the Far East to enable catwalk style to be knocked off and built at lower cost has massively increased the high street's ability to turn around new styles quickly. Digital connectivity can only accelerate this trend, so we can expect the global fashion wheel to spin faster and faster.

The web is also great for market testing. There's a site I love called Threadless.com that allows users to vote for their favourite T-shirt designs. It's essentially a shared marketplace for product prototyping: if a lot of people like a particular T-shirt design, it gets made, so the Threadless community becomes of a way of road-testing designs before any products are actually built.

I've also been fascinated to discover how important fashion is within virtual worlds, in which people can dress up their digital avatars and enjoy the benefits of a new outfit or hair-do at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. This is a kind of theatre of virtual consumption, which works in exactly the same way as consumption in the real world – people lust after objects, save up to buy them, and display them with the same pride they would an analogue object.

Micro transactions that enable people to dress up their digital dolls are the lifeblood of virtual worlds like Second Life, whose economy amusingly echoes and parodies gender roles and attitudes towards shopping and fashion in the real world. Second Life’s economy of virtual goods is dominated by women's clothing, and trying on outfits and shopping is one of the great pleasures the world affords its residents, and one of the reasons why Second Life is used by so many women.

The nascent men's clothing market has never taken off because so many male avatars find one outfit and then never change it again, which kills the market. You see the same gender split in the secondary fashion media around Second Life: while there are some male fashion blogs, they are tiny in number in comparison with the many websites and blogs celebrating female fashion in Second Life.

Tragically, this all maps on to my experience of the way most men and women relate to clothes and shopping online in the real world.

If I want a pair of boots, I Google a supplier, I order the boots, they arrive. It's a brief transaction, the simpler the better. There's very little shopping, just a brief purchase. By contrast, my partner's online fashion experience is all about the shopping. She does a virtual tour of the high street, visiting the websites of Top Shop, Jigsaw, Whistles, and every other retailer in England. She consumes hundreds of images, adds many products to her shopping basket - but doesn't actually buy anything because she wants to see the clothes for real, and check their colour and cut, and she finds the final online credit card transaction so awkward and so painful. For her, online fashion sites are a new and relaxing form of window shopping, an endless build-up with no punchline, in which the windows are Windows on your laptop. Then she goes and buys it in a shop.

Contrast my own bleak, utilitarian transaction to the extended hunting expeditions my wife undertakes in the fashion jungle: catching a distant rumour of a prized shoe, excitedly entering the chase, visiting hundreds of shops, tracking down that perfect cut, ensuring that it's the right size, matching it with a million outfits in her head, and finally bringing it home in triumph. Then it sits in the back of her wardrobe, to be produced discreetly six months later, so that when I say, "Hmm, are those new shoes?" she can look at me with withering scorn and say, "Don't be ridiculous. I've had these for ages…"

My narrow, male attitude to clothes shopping reminds me of the shadow boards you see real men using to keep track of their tools: you hang everything up on a wall and draw around it, which means that if a tool is missing, its absence is glaringly obvious. Once a gap in my wardrobe opens up, as for example when I no longer have a pair of shoes that can decently be worn in public, it's simply a hole that needs filling. I go and buy a shoe-shaped object to fill the hole and then I'm done. It helps if I can go to a clearly marked venue that says Shoe Shop and state my size and the colour of shoe I'd like, and get out of there. If I can keep the transaction time down to twenty minutes, I'm even happier. And of course online I can do the same thing in about five minutes, which works for me. The logical end game here is Albert Einstein's wardrobe, filled with identical jackets and trousers, so he could dress without having to think. Sound man, our Albert.

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Michael Parsons helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine, and was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk

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