NEW YORK, United States — At a news conference Monday morning, livestreamed on YouTube and emceed by the actress Anne Hathaway, Valentino Garavani and long-time business partner Giancarlo Giammetti unveiled the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum, a downloadable desktop application that showcases almost five decades of the designer’s work, drawing on a database of over 180 videos and 5000 images, including Valentino’s original sketches. A fashion first, the digital museum invites users to navigate a series of immersive galleries, organised by theme and rendered in 3-D, that in the physical world would stretch over 10,000 square meters.

Funded entirely by Mr. Giammetti and Mr. Garavani at a reported cost of several million dollars, the virtual museum, which is free to access, serves no direct commercial purpose — the duo no longer have a financial stake in the Valentino business, which is owned by private equity firm Permira — and exists for the sole aim of securing the designer’s legacy.

But the Valentino museum launch comes at a significant moment for the industry. Public interest in fashion exhibitions is surging. This summer’s record-breaking Alexander McQueen exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art attracted over 650,000 visitors. Meanwhile, big luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Chanel and others are moving to control and communicate their heritage by staging large-scale exhibitions at major museums in emerging markets. Gucci has even opened a private museum of its own in the heart of Florence.

While lacking some of the inherent experiential value that comes with exploring a physical space, the Valentino virtual museum offers obvious advantages in terms of cost and reach — no small points in the context of today’s globalised and uncertain economy — and the initiative’s strengths and weaknesses are sure to be examined closely by other fashion brands in the weeks and months to come.

Having previewed the Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum in the days prior to launch, BoF sat down with Mr. Giammetti just before the press conference to discuss the vision behind the world’s first digital fashion museum.

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Victoria's Secret Fashion Show 2011 | Source: Victoria's Secret

NEW YORK, United States — In recent years, the main fashion weeks in New York, London, Milan and Paris have attracted unprecedented interest from end consumers, with brands live streaming their shows and bloggers reporting from the runway in realtime on their sites and social channels like Twitter and Instagram. But in most cases, the actual clothes showcased during fashion week aren’t available to consumers until many months after the shows have finished.

In short, fashion’s communication cycle has become wildly out of sync with its retail cycle. Would the film industry ever hold a movie premiere 6 months ahead of its release to the public? Would Apple make its buzzy product announcements a half-year before said products were available for sale?

By shortening lead times, planning production in advance, and using other lean manufacturing techniques, fashion brands may be able to get product to consumers more quickly. But these kinds of structural changes could take years to implement, especially as many fashion brands do not control the means of production.

One solution has been to let consumers order — but not receive — products immediately after the shows. Mega-brands like Burberry have offered pre-ordering for several seasons now, while a number of mid-sized and emerging brands have collaborated with ‘pre-tail’ trunk-show start-up Moda Operandi to do the same. But market reports suggest that the sales volume of pre-orders has been limited. There are only so many consumers who are willing to plonk down money in advance to guarantee they will get a specific garment in their size months later. Most consumers still seem to prefer to purchase in-season, close to the time of need.

So if enabling consumers to pre-order clothes is not the ideal solution, why not engage consumers just before the collections arrive in store? Based on the evidence of blowout events from Victoria’s Secret and H&M for Versace in New York earlier this month, consumer appetite for this kind of engagement, and the impact it has on sales, seem very promising indeed.

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Savigny Luxury Index October 2011 | Source: Savigny Partners

LONDON, United Kingdom — The market roller coaster continues, but the luxury sector has once again outperformed the general market. While questions remain about the ability for China to sustain the growth of luxury brands, investors seem to be on side again, at least for now. Analysts remain divided about the future of the luxury sector in 2012, amid much macroeconomic uncertainty.

Big news

• Renewed confidence in the sector prompted the SLI to recover the ground it lost from the mass sell-off in September.  The SLI posted an impressive increase of 21.9 percent over the month of October, versus an increase of 7 percent in the MSCI.

• Positive newsflow has boosted the sector, with LVMH, Burberry, PPR and Coach’s quarterly results beating market expectations.  Swatch announced that September was a record month for the group and that 2011 promised to be its best year ever.

• Investor concerns over a slowdown in China were addressed as all major sector players confirmed the Chinese market’s resilience.

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Chloe Raises the Roof at the Tuileries Tent in Paris | Photo: BoF

LONDON, United Kingdom — It was a fashion season of extreme weather. After the New York Fashion Week schedule was upended, first by an earthquake and then by the State of Emergency declaration that came courtesy of Hurricane Irene, an unprecedented heat wave in Paris threw buyers, editors and bloggers into a wardrobe tailspin.

The American editors were worst off, having packed for the European shows two weeks before Paris with no prior notice of the heat wave that was to come. After a few days of shows in impossibly hot venues, some of them resorted to ripping the sleeves off their outfits or just wearing their ‘airplane clothes.’

Brands tried to ease the pain. Fans were distributed at shows alongside champagne and much to everyone’s relief, Chloe arranged for the roof of the Tuileries tent to be removed for their show, letting in the sun and much welcome breeze. Meanwhile Net-a-Porter, always on top of a new market opportunity, delivered heat wave friendly clothes to editors caught without weather-appropriate attire.

But of course the real action was on the runway and in conversations between BoF and the good and the great of the global fashion tribe at a season filled with its fair share of events and parties.

Without further ado, it’s time to look back at Spring/Summer 2012, the season that was.

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Digital IQ Index 2011, Greatest Year-Over-Year Gain or Loss, 2010 vs. 2011 Digital IQ Percentile Rank | Source: L2

NEW YORK, United States — On Monday, Professor Scott Galloway’s NYU-based thinktank LuxuryLab, or L2, released advance copies of their third annual “Digital IQ” report, assessing the digital competence of 49 global fashion and leather goods firms, to a small number of media outlets, including BoF.

According to the study, which will be published later today, fashion brands are embracing digital innovation with enthusiasm and have been amongst the first to pilot forward-thinking marketing initiatives on platforms like Foursquare, Tumblr and the fashion flock’s current obsession, photo-sharing app Instagram. “Some programs could best be described as bleeding edge,” says the study, referring to Ralph Lauren’s experimentation with ‘4D’ projection mapping technology.

But a closer reading reveals that a majority of fashion companies — in a sector which trades on being perfectly contemporary and thinks in terms of trend cycles — still regard the rise of digital media as a trend to be exploited, first and foremost, for its PR and image value.

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