I know I should move, but which way should I go? I am standing inside an enormous hat, which – if I reach out and touch it with hands which are not mine, yet are held by mine – shatters into a million pieces. I feel half human, half robot and entirely discombobulated. This is my first experience of fashion VR.
VR means virtual reality. You know that, pretty soon, we'll be seated on our sofas at home strapped into our Oculus Rift headset and headphones while watching movies so immersive, that wildebeests will be stampeding across the carpet. As for how VR will work for fashion, everyone is, like me, taking baby steps. We know the potential for immersive experiences in a business of creativity is enormous. We just don't want to step off the cliff.
Will VR become the norm for huge advertising campaigns? Will you not only watch them, but experience them, be inside them? Perhaps you and your friends will soon head to the Westfield mall for a shared multi-sensory experience. China already has an emerging culture of social VR, with groups going to VR venues in the same way you would go bowling.
Perhaps the potential lies in in-store experience. Will there be people in headsets, walking through the Gucci store, experiencing a reality entirely unlike those who have just popped in to buy a sweater? While my experience involved walking around on my own two feet within an assigned space "wired up" for VR, will Positron Voyager chairs – which look like giant eggs and have full motion and are already in use for cinematic VR – become the norm in your nearest Chanel? Or will this technology lead us somewhere else entirely?
Vint Cerf, Marc Jacobs
It is these sort of questions which were posed at South by South West (SXSW), the annual music and tech conference held in Austin, Texas, in March. SXSW is becoming of increasing interest to the fashion world: this year's speakers ranged from Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of the internet, to Marc Jacobs, formerly creative director of Louis Vuitton.
Thus do I find myself in a three-metre-square area on the fourth floor of an ugly convention centre, yet thinking I am inside a Philip Treacy hat. I'm experiencing the world premiere of Spatium, created by film director Roland Lane and VR director Alex Lambert, in association with Inition, a leader in immersive technologies. Lane's aim is to push fashion imagery as far as it can go. No wonder then that for his fashion collaborator he went to Treacy, the milliner who has spent his whole career making the impossible possible.
The actual hat recreated in Spatium was first worn IRL (in real life) by Madonna. I appear to be wearing it now, which makes me question what is happening in my brain. It is all too "down the rabbit hole" for me; it blows my middle-aged mind.
When fashion collides with technology, it is always unsettling at first, like when water slams against land, because the two forces are each so powerful. Then they find harmony and it becomes normal. Like e-commerce.
The movie industry is ahead on this. Tom Cruise was at SXSW, virtually, with a zero gravity experience which had people not on the edge of their seats but thinking they were falling off them. Sadly, I wasn't savvy enough to book a Positron Voyager full-motion rotating chair in Ballroom B at the Austin Convention Centre in advance. But everyone who did Cruise's self-funded VR experience, apparently costing $US18 million ($24 million), said it was "awesome". For fashion, hang on to your hat and your headset. We, too, are in for an exciting ride.
International fashion editor Marion Hume is based in London.
