Fashion retailer Forever 21 is using holograms in the place of live models in a series of fashion shows being held this summer and fall. The retailer conceived of the promotion with digital agency space150 and the first show was held in Vienna last week. The other six shows are scheduled in Brussels and London in June and July. In the fall it comes to New York City.

Customers who want to attend receive invites via the retailer's Facebook page, Forever 21 Marketing Manager Kirstin Nagle tells Marketing Daily. Other outreach will be done via social media. The fashion show features holographic models wearing Fashion 21 designs. They walk the run and then disappear into starbursts or alight invisible staircases.

Fashion 21 is no stranger to cutting edge promotions: it introduced an interactive Forever 21 billboard in Times Square last June - a campaign that space150 also conceived. The billboard featured onscreen models who interacted with people outside of the store by "picking up" the people and dropping them into a store shopping bag. There are a growing number of examples of such campaigns, however.

Still Experimental

The use of holographic technology, by contrast, is still quite experimental with vendors just beginning to suggest deployments.

Provision Interactive Technologies announced last year it enhanced the capability of its 3D holographic display platform to be fully interactive with Mobile Mouse, an Apple iPhone application. One suggested use would be for grocery store shoppers, who could interact with a floating 3-D hologram via an enabled Provision 3D display that consumers access via their devices. When they click on the image they can get more information about the product or see it from another view or even receive a coupon. The app uses the built in accelerometer to translate a person's hand motions into mouse movements on the 3D hologram.