The best of 2011: The top three luxury Seeds of the year

London, New York, Miami – I have chosen my three favourite luxury-related Seeds for their collective theme of Revivalism. All of them show how luxury brands need to celebrate provenance and make it relevant for the technology-savvy consumers of the future.

In September Luxury menswear brand Dunhill launched its autumn/winter advertising campaign, Voice, which was notable for the brand’s enthusiastic approach to embracing new technology. By using Aurasma technology to bring its campaign to life on mobile devices, Dunhill presented a snapshot of the changing nature of how we consume media. Readers could download the app, then view the images from the campaign catalogue using their devices. The pictures became animated as the high-achieving men profiled gave short monologues.

In a sign of the digital age touching all walks of life, Italian fashion house Valentino has created a virtual museum. The Italian designer has joined the luxury engagement world of digital branded spaces with his downloadable desktop application. The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum highlights almost 50 years of the designer’s work through immersive galleries housed entirely online. Users can navigate a series of rooms, organised by theme and rendered in 3D that in the physical world would stretch to more than 10,000 square metres.

I was shocked into a mild state of awe by this year’s Design Performance project at Design Miami/ 2011, again at the invitation of luxury fashion house Fendi. German designer Elisa Strozyk and artist Sebastian Neeb made use of the grainy textures of leather and wood for their collaborative work called Craft Alchemy, creating 3D applications to adorn classic pieces of 18th-century furniture. By taking antiques with a history and repurposing them for the 21st century, combining and superimposing new and old ideas of craft, they produced pieces that are immediately contemporary.