It began in the early ’90s when Dilton Doiley made a mirror for Veronica in which she could try on clothes without having to put them on. Any teen girl worth her pimples was super excited about it. The grown-up fashionista is torn between online shopping and Pretty-Woman style boutique visits and pines for a Dilton Mirror. We need another Natalie Massenet (founder of net-a-porter.com) to create a portal to merge the virtual and real ways of shopping. So you can watch the models walk past you, as you sit in your living room and choose the dresses and, maybe, even try them on…virtually.

As much as we have learnt from Hollywood (fashion shows in front of trial-rooms à la Carrie Bradshaw), we love old school trial-rooms; that’s a history by itself but while we are already shopping online anyway, how about trying on the clothes online too?

Holography is the word I am getting at, with the courage derived from the late Alexander McQueen’s Kate Moss hologram (a piece by the video maker Baillie Walsh, art-directed by McQueen) and the Diesel Spring/Summer ’08 catwalk show, staged at the Pitti Immagine Uomo Fair in Florence. Stunned jaws dropped as regular human models paced up and down the runway, a host of 3D characters appeared in mid-air to interact with them within an underwater landscape. And, in a unique twist, these animated holograms were entirely viewable from both sides of the stage. Imagine a hologram of the dress you select, held up for you to ‘put on’. While international TV channels are already conducting interviews with holographic images of their interviewees standing in front of them, it is comforting to know that someday as the designer launches a collection, you will probably receive a 3D try-it-on catalogue.

What is holography, you wonder with some trepidation? It is not just some ’60s psychedelia, it is a technique that allows the light scattered from an object to be recorded and later reconstructed so that it appears as if the object is in the same position.

So using these images, we can simultaneously re-create the show in our living room, which is cool in a Greek mythological way…big noise from the heavens, a flash of lightning, voices and then a gorgeous shimmering image in front of you. You can also create a 3D catalogue, much like the kind from the Jetsons era where they ate capsules and flew around mid sky.

Will holography be the ‘touch and feel’ of online couture shopping? If we have learnt one thing from Avatar it’s that 3D and all its derivatives (holograms i.e.) are here to stay. It’s the future of the Jedi so embrace it – it is uber cool anyway!

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