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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Amble with Louis Vuitton video preview | Source: Louis Vuitton

PARIS, France — “As I think about Google’s strategic initiatives in 2011, I realize they’re all about mobile,” wrote the internet giant’s chief executive Eric Schmidt in a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog. “We are at the point where, between the geolocation capability of the phone and the power of the phone’s browser platform, it is possible to deliver personalised information about where you are, what you could do there right now, and so forth — and to deliver such a service at scale,” he continued.

Now, following in the footsteps of location-based social network Foursquare, major internet players like Google and Facebook are meshing together location-aware mobile services like those described in Mr. Schmidt’s vision with realtime social features, driving explosive growth in an area that John Doerr of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers calls social-local-mobile, or “SoLoMo.”

Earlier this month, Louis Vuitton became the first luxury fashion brand to experiment with a “SoLoMo” service, launching a highly innovative iPhone app and corresponding website called “Amble with Louis Vuitton” that lets users share and discover inspiring places based on their physical location as they explore the cityscapes around them. BoF spoke with Pietro Beccari, Vuitton’s vice president of marketing and communications to find out more.

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NEW YORK, United States — Last night, two of Ralph Lauren’s flagship stores — the recently opened 888 Madison Avenue and the venerable 1 New Bond Street — became towering, real world canvases for an extraordinary “digital extravaganza,” designed to conjure up and communicate the world of Ralph Lauren at epic scale, demonstrate the brand’s dedication to digital innovation, and celebrate the launch of the company’s “digital flagship” in the UK.

BoF experienced the spectacle on both sides of the Atlantic, as digital projection mapping technology made both flagship buildings seem to suddenly disappear, then reappear, block-by-block, before they each opened up like a dollhouse to unleash a 3D parade of four-story tall models, a gigantic virtual polo match, and larger-than-life products. As a collection of perfume bottles appeared, the air was filled with Ralph Lauren’s Big Pony fragrance, giving the event what the brand called a “4D twist.”

A cross-disciplinary team of about 150 people worked for months on the 8-minute experience. First, intricate architectural renderings of the New Bond Street and Madison Avenue stores were created, using 3D scanners and human modelers. Then intricate physical replicas of the stores were built on a Hollywood-style soundstage where real life models were shot walking in front of the façade. The film was then pulled into a 3D software environment where a team of animators (some of whom worked on the Harry Potter films) designed and inserted the giant-scale visual effects. Finally, video “beamers” were painstakingly positioned, so that the projections of the finished 3D film, created at a larger resolution than IMAX, lined up perfectly with the real building.

To be sure, the final effect was exciting. But needless to say, staging this kind of extravaganza required a significant investment — estimated to be more than six figures — on the part of the brand. What was the thinking behind the initiative? What were the underlying objectives? And how does this kind of digital technology fit into the world of the Ralph Lauren brand?

Last week, in a preview of Ralph Lauren’s biggest digital initiative ever, BoF sat down with David Lauren, senior vice president of advertising, marketing and corporate communications, to get the exclusive back story for BoF readers.

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British Vogue iPad App | Source: British Vogue

LONDON, United Kingdom — Later this week, when British Vogue launches its first ever iPad application, everyone across the fashion media landscape is bound to be paying attention. After all, Vogue is the most prestigious fashion media brand in the world, lying at the heart of Condé Nast, the world’s most powerful luxury lifestyle media conglomerate, amidst a market landscape in which age-old media brands like Vogue and others are struggling with the transition to an increasingly digital business model.

Last week, the big news Stateside was that Condé Nast Digital — the digital arm of the media behemoth’s American business — not only lost ownership of Style.com to fellow Condé Nast stablemate Fairchild Fashion Group, but it also lost control of the websites of all the major Condé Nast titles, giving full ownership of these titles to the publishers of the magazines. Positioned as a restructuring “driven by the marketplace,” it’s a dramatic about-face for a company that is beginning to recognise that fully integrated teams of editors and publishers need to oversee all of the digital and offline content and operations in order to offer the seamless experience that consumers and advertisers increasingly expect.

But in the UK, pioneering fashion website Vogue.co.uk — established in 1995, well ahead of its American counterpart which was only set up this past year — remains a separate organisational entity from that of British Vogue the magazine. The new iPad application, on the other hand, was overseen by British Vogue Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Shulman and spearheaded by Art Director Robin Derrick, working with external partners Spring Studios and Six Creative.

In another BoF Exclusive, we got to see the new British Vogue iPad application first, before anybody else. I met with Ms. Shulman at the historic Vogue House in London’s Hanover Square last week to understand how the application — featuring December 2010 cover star Emma Watson — was developed, its underlying business and content strategy, and how this experiment could spark future digital innovation.

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