The latest La Moda in world apparel design and retailing is to offer customized clothing options … buying made-to-measure clothing online.

Online product customization was touted as The Next Big Thing during Internet Bubble 1.0. Those were the Prehistoric Web Days of the late 1990s up through 2001, when the ability to display and online order special shoe colors, select T-shirt artwork and design your own car model (from a bag of pre-selected features) promised to use full personalization powers of the web.

Back then, even Levi-Strauss — evolving from rivet-sewn workhorse jeans once worn by 19^th Century gold miners into a dizzying array of boot/straight/flare cuts and stone-washed/distressed denim fabric — launched a Store-Your-Fit-and-Style-Preferences customer feature on its eCommerce site.

What remained elusive online was truly customized clothing, giving customers the power to design an entire garment and tailor it for a perfect fit according to her body measurements. Until now.

StyleShake founder Iris Ben-David knew such one-by-one customization “is precisely what the Internet is for.” She was aware of market demand for women’s clothing tailored to the specific woman, rather than offering only cosmetic choices to a uniform size/design. Ben-David also faced a hard fact of online retail that needs offline production: Custom designed clothing makes every item individual, which makes automated production almost impossible.

But that is only “almost impossible.” StyleShake’s approach to the dilemma was to go hybrid:

(1) StyleShake deploys a very traditional production process, clothes sewn by real-life, top quality tailors in the center of London who’d been idled by outsourcing of textile manufacturing to the Far East; and

(2) unique personalized services on its web site, like photographic images — piece by garment piece — as customers build their dress from desired design components and choice of fabrics, as well as a virtual guarantee that no two women will design and wear the exact same garment (there are 20,000 unique combinations to date).

Oh, and don’t forget The Next Big Thing on the Internet that is all The Rage Right Now: Social Networking. Clothing designers post their designs on the StyleShake site, where viewers and potential customers criticize or praise them, and rate them in a Top 10 Designs list.

As founder/CEO Ben-David – who has a degree in interactive media plus a background in design and advertising — put it: “Once user-generated content became a hot trend, everything fell into place.”