If you’re familiar with installations such as Xavier De Richemont’s, you know how wonderful and emotional it can be to look at a perfectly coordinated light projection on the façade of a building.
Such installations usually perfectly mix visual arts, architecture, design and music and, in de Richemont’s case, they even manage to tell the visual and intangible animated history of a specific location – often a church or a cathedral – through colours, symbols, images and patterns borrowed from the local urban landscapes and projected on a building.
A few years ago I remember suggesting a friend of mine who had a clothes shop in Glasgow’s Merchant City that it would have been good to collaborate with an artist and arrange a fashion and light installation on the façade of a building or even co-ordinate a holographic kind of fashion catwalk show around the streets of the town.
Quite a few years have gone since then and, while we never managed to do our little project (also because the local Festival of Light doesn’t exist anymore…), Ralph Lauren finally did it in big style last Thursday.
As the night skies were flooded with lights, buildings in New York’s 888 Madison Avenue and London’s 1 New Bond Street were covered in “4-D” light installations.
The latter featured giant models, polo players, bottles of fragrances, clothes and accessories. New illusionary spaces were carved, embedded, built in and around the façades of the two buildings, saturating with colours and objects the masonry, allowing the passers-by to see the walls exploding, shattering, changing shapes, mutating and reconfiguring under their eyes.
Yet there wasn’t any kind of artistic aim behind the project that, in fact, celebrated the launch of the brand’s ecommerce store in the UK.
In a way, it was only natural for fashion to finally turn to light-mapping technology and create through it an invisible vision of luxury. After all projecting an exuberantly rich, vibrantly strong, exceedingly desirable and seductive illusion is the main object of the fashion industry, though usually fashion companies and brands use the pages of magazines and, more recently, the Internet and iPhone applications to do it.
Undoubtedly, the team behind the project did an amazing job as some of the effects used were simply mind-blowing.
But, while David Lauren, the man behind many of the current digital innovations at Ralph Lauren, name-checked futuristic films and modern directors, the main idea behind the spectacle was presenting also a first example of what has been dubbed “merchan-tainment”.
This hybrid term slightly makes you shiver because it essentially hints at the fact that they are trying to convince you to buy something while keeping yourself emotionally entertained and occupied, and this may be the new frontier reached by the fashion industry after the endless fashion and film love story of the last few years.
New "4-D" initiatives are now being planned by Ralph Lauren for what regards markets such as Italy and Asia. Will "merchan-tainment" conquer us? Maybe yes or maybe no. After all, who knows, one day they may even start selling us liquid adverts that we will be able to shoot in our veins and, becoming "merchaddicts", we will enter a fantastic and hallucinatory world where they will sell us the umpteenth designer item. Guess that, only then, fashion labels will finally be able to reach total "customer involvement", or rather, "customer control".
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