Dior turns to gaming for playful rendition of jewellery and make-up collections

Seems Dior has found inspiration in the world of classic arcade games, following the release of several themed videos for both its accessories and beauty lines.

Mise en Dior is the most recent. Unveiled on Nowness.com on Friday, it’s a 3-D rendition of the brand’s costume jewellery line within the confines of a pinball machine:

 

Conceived by the brand’s creative director of accessories, Camille Miceli, it playfully follows a Dior pearls as it bounces around the machine gaining points that see it slowly assembled on a screen with Lurex thread, chunky links and grosgrain ribbon to make the necklace of the video’s namesake.

Various other iconic Dior pieces are also referenced throughout including bar jackets, the Lady Dior bag and Dior J’adore fragrances.

“Life and society have been quite depressed, so I asked myself, ‘How could we have some fun?’ We came up with a pinball machine,” Miceli told WWD. “I wanted to embellish the pearls, they needed to have a couture aspect,” she said. “It’s a frivolous and fun little movie.”

Meanwhile, Dior’s make-up line has also taken to gaming with its colour cosmetic products depicted in four iconic formats: Tetris, Pacman, Pong and Super Mario Land.

Much like Chanel’s animated robots earlier this year, products including the Dior Vernis nailpolish, Dior 5 Couleurs Eyeshadow and Rouge Dior lipstick, among others are reimagined within each. Check it out below:

Dior pulls together fashion and beauty with relaunched website

A great teaser video here for the all-new Dior.com, which just launched today:

 

According to WWD, the revamped site unites Dior’s fashion and beauty offerings at one address in a bid to engage young consumers and reinforce the brand’s luxury orientation and couture roots.

“It’s like putting everything in one store. Today, we are more and more doing big stores because we really want people to experience our universe,” said Sidney Toledano, Dior’s president and CEO. “The only thing missing now is the smell.”

In terms of design, a particular highlight lies in the video section of the site, where more than 80 pieces of content are hosted in a circular slideshow (as pictured below) said to echo the entry rotunda of the brand’s flagship store on the Avenue Montaigne.

Dior is also planning to add a digital magazine, viewable on the web, iPhone and iPad later this year.

Read the full story over at WWD: Christian Dior upgrades world on the web

Digital snippets: Jimmy Choo, The Sartorialist, Target, Jamie Beck, New Look, Polyvore

Some more great stories from around the web surrounding all things fashion and digital over the past week:

 

• Behind-the-scenes on Nan Goldin’s photo shoot for Jimmy Choo’s Icons collection (as above) [YouTube.com/OfficialJimmyChoo]

• The business of blogging: how The Sartorialist makes bank [The Business of Fashion]

• Target website issues continue; “plagued by glitches” [AdAge]

• Profiling From Me To You’s Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg: how a blogging duo is changing fashion photography with animated cinemagraphs [Mashable]

• New Look launches first iPhone app, designed for use in-store [New Media Age]

• Polyvore creates monthly magazine [AdWeek]

• Is Amazon the new Asos [Daily Mail]

• Publishers say tablet business is picking up; $10m for Condé Nast and Hearst not far off [WWD]

The Feeling talk Rosé (Unplugged at Abbey Road for Burberry Body)

 

Here’s the behind-the-scenes film of British band The Feeling discussing their recording of Rosé, the soundtrack to the new Burberry Body fragrance campaign starring Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.

A lovely tribute to “the fabric” of Abbey Road, it was posted last week ahead of the single’s release tomorrow, October 10, alongside its exclusive music video, also recorded at Abbey Road.

To give it its full title, Rosé Unplugged at Abbey Road for Burberry Body, is said to be the first official release of a single by a luxury brand. Burberry has partnered with Shazam, Youtube and Facebook to enable its connection with multiple global audiences.

“Music is a hugely important facet of the Burberry world and with the launch of Burberry Body we wanted to create an iconic soundtrack that reflects the sensuality and attitude of the fragrance. We worked with The Feeling, a band that I have long admired on a unique recording of Rosé at Abbey Road. This exclusive string version captures the mood and spirit of the Burberry Body campaign perfectly,” said chief creative officer Christopher Baliey.

Watch the full Burberry Body campaign film here, or listen to a full-length version of The Feeling’s Rosé, here. Below too is the behind-the-scenes of Rosie’s actual shoot with Mario Testino, released back in August:

 

You can also buy the single on iTunes, here.

 

Ted Baker drives social engagement with in-store campaign

Ted Baker is once again turning its attention to digital with the launch of a new campaign called “It’s Rutting Season”, which ties retail theatre together with social media engagement.

Conceived by digital agency Guided Collective, the initiative celebrates the brand’s autumn/winter 2011/12 collection, Worn to be Wild, by inviting shoppers in various stores around the UK to dress up and have their photo taken by a high profile blogger.

Each of the bloggers – among them Les Garcons Des Glasgow’s Jonathan Pryce, Sara Luxe’s Sara Louise and Mademoiselle Robot’s Laetitia Wajnapel – will be using popular photography app Instagram. The results will then be posted on Ted’s Facebook page, where fans are encouraged to share content by tagging themselves and getting their friends to “like” them in a bid to win a £500 shopping spree.

The rutting season name refers to the fact the collection look book was shot in London’s Richmond Park, which is home to over 600 deer. At this time of year stags can be seen to prove their dominance and does display their desirability out in the wild.

Accordingly, shoppers are being called on to “show off their animal instincts and reveal their wild sides by dressing to impress”. They will each be styled and given a fantastical stag or doe mask to wear.

Sam Reid, founder of Guided Collective, said: “Ted Baker is a fashion brand that we genuinely admire for its principles of building its business primarily through quality product and word of mouth. We hope ‘It’s Rutting Season’ delivers a fun retail experience for shoppers and lots of online content and noise for Ted”.

It launches on October 8 in the Glasgow Princes Square store, followed by Manchester New Cathedral Street on October15 and London Regent Street on October 22.

It also follows on from the success of the Take on Ted campaign in November 2010, which saw a Twitter-operated styling studio created for the launch of the brand’s US e-commerce site.

Other teams involved in the campaign include Collective members Creative Trust on set and deer mask design and production; RAAK on Facebook app and social strategy; and Oh Juliette on project and event management.  Mike Kus, Instagram’s most-followed user, will also be in London taking incidental shots of the participants as they prepare and pose. Kus recently worked with Burberry for its spring/summer 2012 show.

Macy’s offers online sizing service with True Fit

Macy’s has teamed up with tech start-up True Fit to offer a sizing service for consumers shopping online for jeans.

The “Denim Finder” asks users to complete a three-step profile including selecting which brands and sizes fit them best, their overall shape and their height and weight. “We don’t ask you to measure yourself,” says True Fit CEO Bill Adler. “We don’t care what you think your measures are or what size you think you are. That’s a measurement that’s fraught with error.”

The results show consumers a five-point scale of how suitable an item is for their shape, and recommends a size.

Long-term True Fit’s aim is to partner with more retailers meaning users can have one profile across multiple sites.

Read the full story over at Mashable.

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out; the space between the physical fitting room and e-commerce being the ultimate one to conquer for online retailers. There have been lots more murmurs surrounding this over the past few months too – undoubtedly more news to follow.

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful – that’s what matters to me.” Steve Jobs 1955-2011 (Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993)

Illustration by Jonathan Mak

Gareth Pugh on preserving concept through the art of fashion film

In a recent interview with Dazed & Confused magazine, Gareth Pugh talked about fashion film as an add-on to a collection rather than a substitute. I love his thoughts around how it can capture concept and box up emotion beyond the existence of the line itself:

I think to have both is what I want to do next [published before his weekend showing in Paris] – so you’re communicating with an audience through a live show, and you have a film that is more about the world in which those clothes exist, which can be seen anywhere online. Show images exist online forever, but the idea that went behind that show is lost, and at the end of the day it’s bar-coded, it’s shipped out and it’s available to everybody. With the film, an emotion can live on forever.

His spring/summer 2012 film, created with Ruth Hogben and starring Crystal Renn, was shown in Paris this weekend, fused with the live catwalk show. Watch it here:

 

In the same interview, he also touched upon information-overload in the digital age:

I already feel quite separated from the generation below us because of things like Facebook, Twitter and blogging, which we didn’t have as teens. I don’t really get it. I think it’s too much, it’s an overload, and I don’t like that aspect of it. It means the way we live now is so much faster than it used to be. Before, with monthly magazines, a magazine would define what that month was. That’s the great thing about magazines – they are little bookmarks in time, whereas now, there’s no time to bookmark anything because it’s all happening in real time. But now you have so much choice, so much information – there’s so much to absorb. You just have to look at someone like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber – it’s just a phenomenon of the world in which we live, and it would have never happened before, but it’s amazing that things like that can happen at all. It’s like that stupid video on YouTube with that little kid biting that other kid’s finger – funnily enough, I was watching that video the other day, it has over 350 million hits. It bothers me that that can happen, but that’s just the way it is.

Digital snippets: Neiman Marcus and Foursquare, blogging, vlogging and the tablet at retail

Some more great stories from around the web surrounding all things fashion and digital over the past week:

• Neiman Marcus to give away handbags in Foursquare hunt [Mashable]

• Haul videos: marketing to teens through teens [FT]

• Retailers focus on tablets [WSJ]

• How street style changed the frontier of fashion photography [The Cut]

• Fashion bloggers and their agents [NYTimes]