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Christopher Bailey is at it again, claiming another ‘digital first’ for luxury.  This time they’re launching a motion-responsive video campaign which allows users to rotate, pause and drag images 180 degrees.  The idea being to bring the reality of  show experience closer to the end user.  See & hear Christopher breaking it down here.

The catwalk show, to be held at The Chelsea College of Art, on the afternoon of February 23rd, will simultaneously be streamed directly to invitation-only, custom screening sites, designed by Bailey, and fully-equipped with 3D goggles, in New York, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo and Los Angeles.

Burberry is teaming up with SKY Television to utilise its 3D technology for the innovative project, which will include pre-show entertainment hosted from behind the scenes, backstage footage and red carpet arrivals.

Burberry will also live stream its show in 2D at http://live.burberry.com , where viewers can watch and comment on the show in real time using their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

(from telegraph.co.uk)

If the first few weeks of the new decade are anything to go by, it appears the Internet will be playing an increasingly important role in the future of the catwalk show.

Until recently, exclusivity was the word of the day at most fashion house’s catwalk events, with invitations typically reserved for those in the know and with clout. And beefed-up security made sure that if your name was not down, you weren’t coming in.

Nowadays it seems the total opposite is occurring. More and more creative directors are using digital channels to get their latest creations directly in the hands of fashion fans, bloggers and anyone else with an interest.  This Saturday both Emporio Armani and Burberry Prorsum ran their shows live on the internet. Burberry also opened the show to blogging and comments via Twitter.

Earlier last week Dolce&Gabbana posted a preview of their collection on their website. They also ran a live backstage video on screens on either side of the runway, as well as projecting scenes from the movie “Baaria” by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore onto a huge screen, underlining the Sicilian theme of the collection. All of this content was of course made available on their website as well.

And it made little difference if you did not receive an invite to Prada’s Fall/Winter 2010 menswear show, as the entire thing was streamed live via their website last night. Miuccia Prada’s show included a film by video artist Yang Fudong, which is also viewable online.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for how fashion brands are using digital channels to evolve their catwalk shows throughout the year. Keep checking for more details.

The modern luxury industry is arguably built on product placement in one form or another, but Lady Gaga is offering something quite remarkable to luxury brands: the opportunity to get in front of 35million YouTube viewers for starters.  The latest beautifully crafted product from Haus of Gaga is the Bad Romance video, which counts no less than 12 product slots for everyone from Burberry to Versace via Phillipe Starck, La Perla and McQueen.  Why?  Gaga’s opulent visual imagery is an inviting backdrop for a luxury brand.  It is the kind of lavish fantasy that strikes an attractive balance of desirability, edginess and mass appeal.  Couple that with an almost unprecedented reach thanks to social media and it starts to look like a very engaging marketing platform.

British clothing brand Burberry has attracted more than 200,000 unique users and 3m page views to its new social network since launching last week.

The Art Of The Trench encourages visitors to upload pictures of themselves wearing a Burberry trenchcoat to build its own community of fans of the brand. Burberry wants to build on the 700,000 fans it has attracted on Facebook.

Christopher Bailey, creative director for Burberry, said, “Everybody has a different story related to their coat or the first time they came into contact with one. I love the idea that people from all over the world can share those stories and images with each other.”

From New Media Age

Many in the fashion business remain wary of the Internet, partly because of continuing legal battles over online sales of counterfeit goods and concerns about diluting carefully honed brand images. Many companies also have failed to execute online storefronts successfully. But executives say that attitudes are softening as brands realize that the Web provides one of the last untapped sources of potential growth.

Federico Marchetti, the founder of Yoox, a company in Milan that runs retailing sites for luxury brands like Valentino, Emilio Pucci and Jil Sander, said many labels were skeptical not long ago.

“Now,” he said, “it is the opposite.”

The move to capitalize on the Web has become a financial imperative. Analysts at Bain & Company estimate that the sales of luxury goods will fall to 154 billion euros this year ($229 billion), from 170 billion euros in 2008. It is unlikely that online revenue — still only a tiny fraction of the total — will make up the difference soon.

One of the most successful ventures on the Web has been Net-à-Porter, a site based in London that sells high-end fashion and accessories, delivering them to homes or offices in black boxes. Though sales in the United States slowed during the depth of the recession, they have since recovered and have continued to rise at double-digit rates in other markets, the company said. It expects sales this year to top £100 million ($168 million), up from £82 million last year.

“It just made a lot of sense to allow women to shop when they wanted to shop, how they wanted to shop — at work, at home, in bedroom,” said Natalie Massenet, the company’s founder.

At a time when trundling along high-end strips like Bond Street in London or Avenue Montaigne in Paris with an armful of shopping bags seems out of touch with reality, Net-à-Porter may have benefited from the greater discretion that its service offers. Last year, to cloak purchases even more, the company added a brown-bag delivery option. This year, in another bit of good timing that Ms. Massenet attributed to luck rather than foresight, the company added a new site selling fashions from previous seasons at reduced prices.

Customer overlap between the sites is only 6 percent, Ms. Massenet said, with fashionistas frequenting the original Net-à-Porter and bargain hunters turning to the new site, outnet.com.

That ought to comfort luxury executives worried that selling online might undermine the high-end appeal of their wares — and the high prices that come with such exclusivity.

Some individual brands that previously refrained from selling online have recently embraced the Internet. Hugo Boss, the German clothier, started introducing Internet shops in Europe last year. Now it is accelerating its online efforts, planning to open similar stores in the United States early next year and in Asia the year after, said Claus-Dietrich Lahrs, the chief executive.

Mr. Lahrs said Hugo Boss expected to sell more than 50 million euros of goods online within two years, up from a little more than 10 million euros this year.

While some labels are now trying to make up for lost time, others remain cautious about the pitfalls of the Internet.

Led by the largest company in the business, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, luxury brand owners have fought a series of legal battles across several continents with Internet companies like Google and eBay, contending that they aided in the online sale of counterfeit goods. Courts have issued mixed rulings, sometimes siding with the brand owners and fining the technology companies, and in other cases agreeing that sufficient steps were being taken to root out fakes.

Some executives also remain reluctant to invest heavily in digital initiatives because of costly failures in the past. Uché Okonkwo, a Paris-based consultant, said that brand owners are “many steps behind the clients, when they should be several steps ahead of them.”

One brand that has won plaudits from analysts for its efforts is Burberry. This month, it created a social networking site that allows owners of Burberry’s trench coats to exchange stories about them.

Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer, said high-end brands should go further in trying to give Web stores the rich texture of physical stores.

“Whether they are walking into our store on Bond Street or tapping in from India or China, it’s about making sure the consumer is getting the same experience,” he said.

From New York Times