Firstview.

www.firstview.com

One or the most appealing features of Web media is its comprehensiveness. Firstview caters to fashion-watchers in an encyclopedic mood: You can browse through collections by hundreds of designers--from Giorgio Armani to Vivienne Westwood, and everybody in between--going back five years. A separate catalogue of video clips is also available. Instead of looking at fashion as fashion, I like to envision the endless photographs as a kind of atlas of imaginary anatomy, paying no particular attention to the designer or the year.

Lev Manovich is the author of The Language of New Media, forthcoming from MIT Press this spring. A new-media artist, critic, and theorist, he teaches in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego.