Meet "Lawnmower Woman" Analysis/Commentary Sometimes the Web's reality doesn't seem virtual enough. As a shopping place, it stinks. You can buy a VCR with enough confidence to anticipate that it will fit in the niche below your TV set, or grab a book from Amazon.com knowing that its title and contents pretty much match the description oo the dust cover, but what about clothes? Will they look, feel, and fit the way you want them to? Probably not. Clicking on icons might not be the best way to shop for apparel. Shoppers have hazy notions of their proportions and some clothes have proportions of their own, recalcitrant to the tape measure. This happens even in non-virtual environment like department store dressing rooms. You might wonder whether clothes manufacturers use Victorian mannequins. Nor is it compelling for enterprising merchants on the Web to discover that, statistically, women do more shopping than men in virtual as well as in real space. The displays in cyberspace seem an insult to the "art of the shop" -- the cloying, playful, touchy-feely, hem-and-hawing, maybe-yes-maybe-no-ing, teasing, tottering decision-making practiced by the female of our species. There she is, in cyberland without a compass, her instincts baffled because her senses are woefully misled. Is there a remedy? Colorwise, the graphics on the Web require calibration, attunement to actual tones and hues that cyber-merchants seem unwilling to adjust. Has the medium totally distorted the human sense of color, or is it a flaw in the makeup of pixels or cyan-yellow-black-magenta? When will on-screen colors begin to resemble real life? And what about "hand"? (The feel of cloth or fabric.) E-commerce sites try to give shoppers an insight into the softness or coarseness of a fabric using a maginification or "zoom" feature. But this is akin to discerning shape by sense of smell, or taste by sense of touch. Virtual shopping invites synesthesia, the kind of mingling of the senses that only experimental poets or painters dare attempt. Then, do merchants really expect women to buy bathing suits without trying them on? Some imaginative engineers devise virtual models that show the overall look of a garment on a human form, but tend to use models designed to fit clothes, rather than vice-versa. They assume that a shopper will match some established set of measurements corresponding to a range of clothes sizes. But who knows his or her ham or ankle size, or whether that dainty lump he/she sits on measures up to the expectations of norm-guided couturiers? The solution might be a deus ex machina -- a Lawnmower Woman -- a projection of a real-life form into the netherworld of the computer. Instead of life imitating art, art could imitate life, and a minimal realism might entail. Some enterprising engineers anticipate an era of realistic scans -- of human measurements embodied into the CAD images simulated by computers from manufacturers' specifications. An online dressing room would serve as a place to project real-life measurements into images displayed by merchants. The resulting fit or non-fit would give credible guidance as to whether an item of apparel passes muster. The technology of virtual apparel modeling might yet offer a suitable alternative to the Saturday afternoon shopping spree, minus embarrassing returns. Art professes to hold up a mirror to life. Will it hold one up to the shopper? June 14, 2000