Ed Warren is the Chief Creative Officer of Sunshine; a brand and entertainment company that creates entertainment properties for clients and commissioners, replacing interrupting the things people love with making things people love. Here, he discusses the possibilities of technology in the retail world.
According to the Jetsons-sleek future envisioned by our tech-giant overlords Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, AR and VR will totally revolutionise the worlds of fashion and retail. Interactive mirrors will assist our shopping experience, our lifelike avatars will try on clothing for us in online boutiques, we will test virtual makeup on our virtual faces, Oculus will allow us to rub shoulders (virtually) with Anna Wintour on front rows at Paris Fashion Week, whilst Alexa will give us constructive style tips on today’s outfit. It’s a brave new virtual world full of exciting new flavours of reality – Virtual, Augmented, Mixed, Blended, Decaf – you pick. “I don’t think there is any sector that will be untouched by AR,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO in a 2017 interview in Vogue, and Apple’s recent move of long-term iPhone executive Frank Casanova – the man Apple relies on to launch new products – to handling product marketing for all things relating to Augmented Reality suggests Cupertino are about to step up their Augmented efforts. “Over time, I think [these features] will be as key as having a website,” Cook said.
You don’t have to look hard to see the green shoots of the virtual revolution already starting to surface: remarkable London-based digital retail agency Holition have created a blended reality mirror for Bourjois Paris that allows shoppers to try on virtual shades of lipstick. Fashion tech leader Metail are on a mission to digitise the world’s clothes and have developed algorithms that allow users to easily create body accurate avatars to try them on. Farfetch test-drove their ‘Store of The Future’ at their Browns location in late 2017. Amazon’s Echo Look has a machine learning system that compares photos of different outfits you’re wearing and judges which one is more “in” at that very moment. And since the distant past of 2014 and Top Shop’s Virtual Runway show at London Fashion Week, fashion brands have been using VR to teleport users to their shows.
Tech culture’s god is efficiency. Tech brands and great tech thinkers are by nature disruptors who exist to remove both middlemen and friction from their consumers’ journey to purchase. Their creed is to serve the consumer and make their lives easier (and to suck up all their lovely, lovely data).
But luxury brands don’t worship at the altar of efficiency. Quite the opposite. There are more efficient ways to make a piece of luggage than those employed in the ateliers of Louis Vuitton but that’s not the point. Luxury prizes uniqueness and audacity over ease. And successful luxury brands don’t exist to serve their clients; they exist to lead them into new and marvellous places, as a glance at Gucci under Alessandro Michelle will tell you.
There are many excellent use-cases of VR and AR that lean towards utility and efficiency in exciting and elegant ways. But there are many more where these new technologies can be wielded to create new, wild and magical experiences for their clients. And for luxury brands this use may be more important.
For example, last year Sunshine worked with Balmain, MPC and Oculus to create ‘My City of Lights’, a VR installation for the opening of Balmain’s new stores. Rather than merely improve the possible, we wanted to allow visitors to do the impossible – to step inside Creative Director Olivier Rousteing’s head and view his creative process from the inside. The queues went round the block. It is this power of AR and VR to permit the impossible that is truly exciting for luxury brands in particular.
But to unleash that potential brands need to move past the first uses of the tech. Whenever a disruptive new technology emerges, there is a gap between it appearing and its full exploitation by the arts. We first repeat the old form through a new technology, then we habituate to it and a new form is born.
Look at the invention of the television and music. Initially, music replicated the old form of live shows – The Beatles strumming away on Jonny Carson – but soon a brand new form was born – the Music Video – as the leading creatives in that industry realised what was possible.
Currently with VR and AR we’re in the gap. But why merely teleport fans of your brand to your fashion show when you could create an impossible catwalk where giant models stride down the Champs Elysee, or walk Escher-like through impossible staircases? Why use a VR mirror to replicate the role of the shop assistant when you could transport them to Bali (or Alpha Centauri, or the surface of a hydrogen atom) for a selfie? This is particularly pertinent given the rapidly evolving role of brick-and-mortar retail, spaces that (for luxury brands in particular) are no longer about information (the slab of glass in my pocket does that for me, thanks) but must instead become playgrounds that entice clients with experience, entertainment… magic.
And so with AR and VR the limit isn’t technology, it’s what you do with it. The limit is, as it always has been, is your imagination. As Tom Hardy’s character advices in Inception – that film about exciting new flavours of reality – “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”
