A sigh of joyous approval went up from the fashion crowd when Apple presented the MacBook Air to the techno world.
At last! A streamlined, light-as-a-feather, tactile laptop to match the gleaming BlackBerry Pearl or that stylish Prada cellphone.
The Mac Air was immediately embraced as the ultimate object of high-tech desire. But how many people in the fashion industry will use it - or any other computer?
It is one of the best-kept fashion secrets that even now, a generation into the cyberuniverse and in the era of MySpace and YouTube, at least one-third of designers (and even some chief executives) are computer illiterate.
And if you took away the PAs, who cover up shortcomings by printing out e-mails and taking down dictated replies, the number of technophobes is probably nearer 50 percent.
The list of those who admit that they don't do computers is astounding, for it embraces some of the most powerful designers, like Nicolas Ghesquière of Balenciaga, who says sheepishly: "No, I am not really Internet - but I just got a BlackBerry." And even Marc Jacobs, who sometimes posts comments on blogs (his wind-down amusement at day's end), says that he feels like "a kind of Luddite" in contrast with his techno-savvy friends.
"I do know how to Google," he says. "And I've even had a relationship from the Internet. But I can't sync up with my iPod; I don't know how to use Photoshop and machines break around me."
There is no danger of any of that happening to Yves Carcelle, chief executive of Louis Vuitton and Jacobs's boss. He doesn't touch technology and famously, in the well-wired LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group, answers queries with hand-written replies.
Why does it matter if Alber Elbaz of Lanvin doesn't know one end of a laptop from another, when he makes such stylish, modern clothes? If Paul Smith can wow the Japanese with his wit and style, who cares if the designer is not surfing the Internet or that, as his wife Pauline admits, neither of them even has a cellphone?
The answer is that fashion is spawned from the culture that surrounds it. So designers who turn their backs on the virtual world are not getting inside an intense new culture.
Could it even be that today's fashion malaise - a sense of imminent breakthrough that is always stalling - springs from technophobia impeding the next fashion revolution?
There are, of course, specific links between clothing and technology, like the Calvin Klein menswear collection in which the designer Italo Zucchelli created "patterns" using a fabric that responded to body heat; or Zegna's iPod jacket that powers the unit via the sun.
But we are talking about something different: the influence of the virtual world on creativity. It is not about smart fashion brands creating hip Web sites or getting their clothes on the virtual world site Second Life, but about a designer understanding the modern mind-set and undergoing the experience.
Karl Lagerfeld is proof that you don't have to have your fingers on the keyboard to understand the culture. The designer, who fills his home and studio with the latest technology, from plasma screens to iPods, cannot operate any of it himself.
Lagerfeld sees things his way - and given his profound culture and the multitude of books surrounding him, he is probably correct in his judgment. "I don't use a computer; I do research with my brain," Lagerfeld says. "And if I want or need to - I get people to do it for me."
Elbaz is more specific about his decision to ignore the techno world. "I open my imagination to push me forward," the designer says. "A computer is about getting into a formula - and that is the biggest danger to the imagination."
"I work with my heart and write with my brain," Elbaz says. "You take the knowledge but go forward with your feeling, your instinct. Above all, you have to start and end with the dream."
Looking at the "Trembled Blossoms" animated film on the Prada Web site, it is hard to believe that Miuccia Prada herself was not the source of this captivating dream and involved in every step of the production in Los Angeles. Prada's romantic perversity is captured in the android nymph in an enchanted forest, where bugs scrabble over her feet and morph into shoes, while a phallic stone statue of Pan offers up the Holy Grail: a Prada bag.
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