Since UNIQLO may well be the most web-savvy retailer around (see UniQlock, Uniqlo Calendar and Uniqlo Tunes), it might come as a surprise to some readers to hear that they JUST started Twitter and Mixi accounts for the first time on November 20.Why so late to the grassroots level of social networking? While they were making innovative Flash sites (see their Premium Downs site!) and popular widgets, they didn’t get involved in any of the networks themselves, instead relying on the viral quality of their content to spread itself. Judging by how many UNIQLO pieces we’ve done on this site alone, that was a pretty good tactic at the time.

“It was all just a fad,” said Jeff Rudes, a founder of the hot-denim-label-du-jour J Brand Jeans and an astute observer of the suspiciously inflated prices of fashion’s most eternally reinvented staple.

The denim bubble has burst, and only a handful of such extravagantly priced jeans remain at the jeans bar — labels like PRPS and 45rpm, which, in tacit acknowledgment of the decline of the premium business, are now more often referred to as “artisanal” jeans. Meanwhile, the sweet spot for designer jeans has relocated to a neighborhood just below $200, even though the styles do not look substantially different from the $300 jeans that were on the sales floors of Barneys New York and Bloomingdale’s only two years ago.