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IT TOOK A WHILE, BUT WOMEN'S WEAR DAILY IS GOING ONLINE.

The Internet Economy has never held much allure for the folks on fashion's Seventh Avenue. They haven't figured out how to make money online, the geeks involved dress like slobs, and those long hours give you horrendous bags under your eyes.

But none of that seems to bother Rochelle Udell, the fashion journalist, designer and retail executive behind the unlikely launch of Women's Wear Daily's new Web venture. The site aims to broaden the 90-year-old fashion industry bible beyond its devoted 55,000 subscribers. Udell says the in-depth offerings -- 80 percent of which will not appear in print -- will bring in more paying readers in the United States and abroad.

The timing of the launch -- set for Sept. 10 -- hardly seems auspicious. Internet media businesses are in trouble these days, and almost no one has been brave enough to launch a new online publication -- much less one requiring a subscription. Women's Wear Daily, which is owned by Fairchild Publications, expects readers to pay $995 a year. That includes a subscription to the print edition, which sells for $99 to $195 a year.

But Udell, 51, may have the right blend of experience and chutzpah to pull this off. In the fashion industry she's a legend, having been the art director of Vogue in the early 1970s, editor in chief of Conde Nast's Self in the '90s, and, more recently, a senior VP at retail giant The Limited. On the Internet, she was founder of CondeNet, the ambitious (though not successful) umbrella site for Conde Nast's magazines.

Udell has learned from the past. She's kept her team slim, barely 25 employees working at Fairchild's New York headquarters. (Thirteen tech specialists were laid off last week.) She's taking advantage of Women's Wear Daily's reporters, editors, databases and reports to stock the new site. And she's relying on the technology already built by Advance Publications (which owns both Fairchild and Conde Nast). "Why reinvent the wheel?" she asks.

Indeed, the site will be an important outlet for Women's Wear Daily's signature product: industry news. "This will provide us with the opportunity to break stories 24 hours earlier," says Ed Nardoza, editor of the print edition. In news, after all, it doesn't pay to be fashionably late.