Curalate | Watch: Dior, Yves Saint Laurent Lead Luxury’s Virtual Reality Revolution

This Story was originally written for Curalate.

Consumer behaviors today are far more complex than in years past when traditional advertising like print, television and radio ruled. Cross-screen behavior is the name of the game today, and people are taking in content through a variety of digital channels and platforms. For millennials, consumption is social, mostly online, and constant — and it’s changed the way they discover and buy products.

While this new era of media and marketing poses as a huge challenge to brands, it also allows them to experiment with innovative technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality — or risk being deemed irrelevant by a sophisticated, mobile-first audience, reports Luxury Daily.

Luxury brands like Dior and Yves Saint Laurent are at the forefront of advanced marketing campaigns, using sophisticated tools like virtual reality and 360-video to create gorgeous, compelling advertisements. Smart luxury brands will follow suit or risk being left behind.

Last October, Dior released a 360-degree video to hype their skincare line, Dior Prestige. The video takes you inside the childhood home of Christian Dior in Normandy, France. You can explore the stunning seaside grounds teeming with pink roses, while an ethnobotanist explains how the ocean breeze nourishes the Rose de Granville — the star ingredient in Dior Prestige. The 360-degree video dovetails nicely with Dior TV’s other traditional marketing videos, but it’s alluring in its interactive, insider look into the very heart of the brand — Christian Dior’s home.

In one of the coolest marketing moments of the year, YSL seamlessly integrated a campaign for their new perfume, Mon Paris, across print, video and augmented reality. The traditional print ad is a stunning, vertigo-inducing image of two lovers in Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in the background up-ended — a visual representation of the inspiration for the scent, a head-over-heels Parisian love affair. There’s a minute-long video of the couple falling in love, cavorting around the city and ending on the rooftop where the print image was shot. Finally, there’s a VR video on the YSL site (which was also playing on VR headsets at the Mon Paris launch event), showing 360-degree views of all the locations in Paris depicted in the film.

With luxury brands paving the way for virtual and augmented reality technology in ad campaigns, they are spearheading the future of marketing in fashion. Fashion houses like Dior and YSL are setting a standard for using innovative technology in marketing by offering VR/AR experiences that impress consumers, add to an existing campaign, or offer an inside look at the brand or the campaign. Dior and YSL are proving that VR is no longer limited to the gaming world or tech companies; innovative technology has a place in sophisticated fashion marketing — and we’ve only seen the beginning.

Another luxury brand doing it right? Harry Winston. Although they don’t sell their engagement rings, diamond necklaces or luxury watches online, the brand partnered with Curalate to power the jeweler’s Like2Buy page — offering 665,000 Instagram followers the ability to see detailed product information and make in-store appointments.