Author | Chang'anke (DoMarketing - marketing think tank), source | DoMarketing - Marketing Think Tank (ID: Domarketing-001), unauthorized, prohibited reproduction.
In a world where information is flooded and redundantly overloaded, how can brands present themselves? Dior chose to open a museum.
A few days ago, the luxury brand Dior Museum La Galerie Dior officially opened at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. Covering an area of about 2,000 square meters, the museum presents the brand's history, culture and DNA to the audience in an all-round way with 13 conceptual spaces with different themes.
The exterior of La Galerie Dior still maintains the original French style and layout, with a total of seven floors, including boutiques, haute couture workshops and fine jewellery workshops, three gardens, restaurants, exhibition spaces, cafés and suites.
The interior design incorporates a variety of genres and styles of different eras: the parquet floors of the Palace of Versailles, the everywhere Jouy prints, the tables and chairs created by famous designers... Most striking is the huge curved white marble staircase in the center of the interior atrium, which contains three-dimensional models of 1,874 Dior objects, displaying Dior's dresses, bags, hats, perfumes and more since 1947.
Obviously, the dior museum is not a simple showroom, but a fusion of culture, history, hospitality, education and retail tourism, through the collection of these contents to tell the story of the brand's history – so that the audience is immersed, immersive to understand and explore the brand, so that the relationship between the brand and consumers is closer.
Peter Marino, a museum architect, also said: "This is not just a place for exhibitions, but a traveling space that tells a story, allowing people to maintain an interactive and emotional connection with Dior from the beginning." In Dior's environment, let people explore the brand in a beautiful, immersive, and enjoyable way. ”
In fact, 30 Avenue Montaigne is not dior's first museum, the most famous is the country house "Les Rhumbs" designed by the founder of the Dior brand himself, where the founder lived as a child.
Located in the city of Granville near Le Mont-Saint-Michel, the building sits on a hanging rock overlooking the sea and is set in an English garden designed by Dior and his mother Madeleine.
Like 30 Avenue Montaigne, this villa also bears witness to the birth and development of the Dior brand.
Christian Dior, the founder of the Dior brand, was born in 1905 to a wealthy family in Granville, Normandy, northern France, his father was a business owner, his mother loved garden art, and his mother's feeling of art was transmitted to little Dior very early.
In the 1920s, under the influence of his parents, Dior enrolled in Sciences Po, but his original intention was to study architecture (which is also elaborated in his memoirs). He loved music, but design and painting soon became his biggest point of interest.
In the 1930s, Dior and his friends ran a gallery in Paris and began to really get into fashion. Encouraged by his actor friend Jean Ozenne, Dior began selling some design sketches and embarked on the path of designer.
In 1945, Dior met the fabric giant Marcel Boussac, who had the foresight to give him the high-end women's clothing store named after him at 30 Rue Dei Montaigne and invested 60 million francs. On December 16, 1946, the first Christine Dior high-end women's clothing store was officially opened. In 1948, Dior went to New York to open a store, and in the following 11 years, his stores spread to 15 countries around the world, employing more than 2,000 people, Dior began to become a well-known fashion brand.
After Dior's death in 1957, the villa was converted into a museum dedicated to the brand's founder and designer, Christine Dior, and the only museum in France dedicated to a fashion designer.
The museum is a place full of awe and curiosity, and the charm of the brand museum lies in a commodity that was originally used for trading, put on the cloak of history and culture, and can no longer be measured only by the numerical price, and the development behind it has advanced the brand to a new height.
From marriage to art to technology, from unique architectural design to ingenious exhibits, nothing shows the core values of a brand as a unique brand museum. For consumers, the brand museum is a shortcut to better understand the brand culture, while for the enterprise, it creates an interactive space for a better immersive communication experience with customers.
Therefore, many well-known brands, especially those with historical and cultural connotations, like to open their own brand museum, and then use the art museum as a carrier to spread fashion and brand spirit to the public.
Back in 2006, Bernard Arnault, head of LVMH, the world's largest luxury empire, announced the creation of the Louis Vuitton Creative Foundation and chose a site in the Boulogne park in Paris. He once said at the press conference that he wanted to make the art gallery of the Louis Vuitton Creative Foundation a "new cultural landmark" in Paris.
Designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry, the Louis Vuitton Creative Foundation is like a glass cloud above the amusement park in the north of the Boulogne Forest in Paris. The Boulogne Forest, once a place where Parisians and artists lingered, the location of the building reflects Louis Vuitton's intention to bind his brand to art.
Choosing a cultural gathering place to build a brand museum is also suitable for Gucci. Gucci transformed the historic Palazzo della Mercanzia in Piazza della Signoria in the heart of Florence into a brand museum in 2011, which was later upgraded to the Gucci Garden in January 2018.
This square is the origin of the Renaissance Republic of Florence and occupies a very important place in the rise of local Florentine culture, and this building was built in 1308 as a trade association for importers of textiles and fabrics, and for the past 700 years or so, in addition to being the residence of government officials, it was also one of the residences of the prominent Medici family in Florence, so the building itself has a very deep historical and cultural heritage.
After Gucci's redesign, the entire space was redesigned according to the vision of the brand's creative director, Alesandro Michele, with a strong sense of visual impact, retaining the original architectural features such as vaults, arches, colonnades, painted floors, etc., with contrasting jumping color combinations, antique wooden furniture and fashion design masterpieces.
For example, the famous Mercedes-Benz Museum has collected many luxury vehicles used in the past, as well as the engines of many racing cars and record-breaking vehicles, which also tell people about the tough beauty of contemporary industrial culture behind the Mercedes-Benz brand.
As for why the big names love to build a brand museum, the official introduction of Mercedes-Benz has made it very clear:
"A fascinating museum, a Mercedes-Benz Center that showcases the trends of the future, brings the world of Mercedes-Benz together ancient and modern." Here, from the birth of the first car to our ambitions for the development of the automobile, the new museum recreates the 120-year history of the automotive industry, and it is only here that people can truly appreciate the history of the entire automotive industry! Similarly, it is only here that models, from sedans to commercial vehicles, present a complete Mercedes-Benz family. ”