Burberry Fashion Show Sports Holographic Models

Holographic concerts: not just for the Japanese anymore!

In yonder Beijing, Burberry fêted the opening of a new flagship store with a holographic catwalk show, featuring only six human models. The rest were 3D projections that the Digital Buzz Blog says were "almost undetectable and seamlessly integrated into the show."

The new store is one of about 100 Chinese Burberry locations that will be outfitted with "digital experiences."

Last February, Burberry kicked off what it called the first-ever 3D livestream fashion show. Footage appeared in real-time on select fashion blogs, sometimes in 3D, sometimes not (depending on how high up your publication was in the readership hierarchy).

An Eerie Ad that Reflects a Strange Truth

This piece by Lowe China and Stink for TMall.com is so unsettling and beautiful to watch that you forget it's an ad on a mission (until the end, when the scenery flips into tile and you're rudely, if cleverly, reminded).

I love that moment where you think you see a person, hair blowing in an intimate way ... and it turns out to be illusion. It's strange to see man-made landscapes, constructed to welcome modern living foot traffic, left naked like that.

But it also echoes a stranger reality in China: the aggressive city building it's doing in isolated areas that, accounting for the vulnerability its real estate market is to crashes, are left equally desolate with new paint still drying on the walls. A lot of these places are shopping centres left abandoned in their shiny optimism.

A passage from Forensic Area Limited brings both ad and reality to sharp relief:

There’s city after city full of empty streets and vast government buildings, some in the most inhospitable locations. It is the modern equivalent of building pyramids. With 20 new cities being built every year, we hope to be able to expand our list going forward.

What are our pyramids, our lasting excesses?

330 Square Feet, 24 à-La-Carte Possibilities

With a system of sliding walls on tracks (tactfully camouflaged with panels of mirrors), Hong Kong architect Gary Chang makes the most of his family's 330 square-foot apartment.

The idea is attractive because most major metropolitan capitols now suffer from a dearth of space. Living in small apartments in Paris and Berkeley, for example, taught me to be neater and more strategic in my organization than I am naturally inclined to be; every square foot counts, and after using one given area you have to clean it up -- at risk of suffocation.

Everything you own works hard to merit remaining in your ownership. By necessity you become more particular about the furniture you choose, the clothes you buy (many Parisian apartments don't have closets, and decisions about a proper armoire makes things more complicated) and where things fit. On top of that, everything must function in such a way, and be organized in a welcoming enough fashion, that you actually want to be there: day in, day out, living your life, reading alone or entertaining friends.

Embedded in all this are lessons about sustainability and teaching yourself to be more efficient, as opposed to simply buying more efficient machines (which pile up). Those lessons are priceless: they spread into all other facets of your life, creating efficiencies where none previously existed.

What you find is, while lack of space may be purely a matter of circumstance, lack of time is something we all have in common. You learn to make time work harder too: maximizing your pleasure, your benefits, the wealth of your life that can't be measured by having acquired people, things or money in large quantities (all of which, left untended, yield inefficiencies in some form).

Benetton Tries Mending China and Tibet

30 shots of quake victims interspersed with 30 Tibetan prayers, all in the current issue of Colors magazine.
People can say what they want about Benetton, but I love how it puts its neck on the line to poke at sociopolitical sores we think are none of its business. What better way to leverage the power brands have on those that define themselves by what they buy?
If it also happens to be a great marketing strategy, I'm not complaining.