If you were among the swarms of people in New York this summer who dared to see the Alexander McQueen retrospective at the Met, you probably spent upwards of four hours crawling your way up one of two lines, taking turns running to the nearest Starbucks bathroom, all to see what was an undeniably stunning archive of McQueen’s couture. Set to a series of emotive soundtracks, against immersive backdrops, and alongside memorable fashion show footage (and even a dancing hologram), the show certainly did all in its power to assuage the frustration of having spent most of the day staring longingly at Central Park hot dog carts.

Well, visionary fashion designer Valentino Garavani wants to bring us the experience of seeing his work in a museum hall, all without having to leave the very spot you’ve planted yourself in now. As Hyperallergic reports, the esteemed designer has arranged his archives in a downloadable virtual museum: 10,000 square meters of virtual space, there for you to access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at your own pace.

Upon entering the museum, you are ushered into a dazzling white-walled exhibition hall with glass ceilings, where a scarlet coat from Valentino’s 1965/66 Haute Couture collection is suspended in a massive translucent red glass cube for you to approach or ignore–it’s all up to you! You are then invited to roam through different halls, navigating through the collection at a meditated pace, with thousands of virtual dresses and other cloud-bound artifacts at your very fingertips. Though not quite the same as seeing the works in real life, the innovation in housing an extensive archive of images and information in a virtual museum is commendable, and it excitingly seeds ideas for shaping architecture within the computer screen.

To visit the museum, download it here!

by Kelly Chan

posted in news

tagged Archive, museum, online, Valentino, Virtual Reality

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