A virtual Valentino museum will launch next month, providing an insight into the world of the Italian fashion house.
A virtual Valentino museum will launch next month, providing an insight into the world of the Italian fashion house.
The Museum is to be a downloadable desktop application; it’s the first of its kind from such a massive designer. Valentino will open up his archive of 5,000 images of dresses, illustrations and photographs plus 95 fashion show videos to the public, as a downloadable desktop application on December 5th. Thanks to 3D technology, The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum will give users the sensation of attending a real museum, featuring more than 300 dresses. Outfits will be accompanied by anecdotes, red carpet images and illustrations, as well as advertising campaigns and editorials.
Created by Valentino Garavani, who retired from his eponymous fashion house in 2008, and business partner Giancarlo Giammetti, the online museum will focus on 50 years of the fashion house. Valentino said they were launching the “Garavani Virtual Museum” so that students, young designers and others in the industry can study every aspect of Valentino’s work in a manner easy and accessible for the younger generations. He sees the museum as a part of his legacy and said he believes it is “important to remember things of the past, to review the fashion that has shaped our lives. I would call it “Future Memory”.’
Rather than build an actual museum to house their extensive archive, the duo deliberately wanted to make this an online venture. ‘It is an idea that I had many years ago, after going through a great museum site and being able to navigate through these rooms full of paintings,’ Giammetti said, referring to the site for the Barnes collection in Pennsylvania as his original impetus. ‘But it was real. It was just a camera going around. I asked myself if it would be possible to recreate a vast computer-generated museum. We started designing and nothing really appealed to me. I wanted to have the light of Rome without looking old. I wanted to show not only the dresses but the history behind them, from the drawing to the women who wore them.’
Labels including Armani, Max Mara and Dior have already opened museums commemorating their fashion history, while this September Italian luxury brand Gucci unveiled the Gucci Museo in Florence’s historic Piazza della Signoria. Online galleries are less commonplace, although they have been done before: in 2009 Italian fashion house Salvatore Ferragamo launched an online museum detailing its style history, featuring images and vintage films.
Previews of the site are being released via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, allowing the public to comment on the launch and see contents of the museum. You can watch a video preview of the museum here.
Valentino and Giammetti will fully unveil the museum online, with a press conference being live steamed on You Tube. The desktop application can be downloaded from December 5 at http://valentino-garavani-archives.org.