To celebrate Father's Day 2015 yesterday, the New York flagship of US department store chain Bloomingdales partnered with luxury fashion brand Ralph Lauren's Polo division on a digitally interactive, shoppable window display that also allowed consumers to customise its classic signature products.

The installation on 59th Street comprised six windows fitted with high-definition, ultra-bright plasma screens, boasting touchscreen technology incorporated directly into the glass. The screens displayed large-scale images of the brand's signature products such as its iconic Polo and Oxford shirts, ties and chinos. Passers-by (ably assisted by model-esque staff) could 'customise' the items by choosing from a palette of 18 selected colours. Additionally, a mix-and-match feature allowed them to view products in combination – boosted by realistic projected imagery that showed styling in motion, such as a tie being wound around the neck of a chosen shirt.

A corresponding interactive mobile app allowed users to purchase the products directly from their mobile device, or they could simply pop into the Polo shop.

The concept echoes Ralph Lauren's previous forays into theatrical digital experiments, spearheaded by its use of holographic technology for its S/S 15 catwalk show in September 2014, created with multinational visual effects studio MPC. For more on that project see Fashion Week S/S 15: Social Media & Tech. 

Meanwhile in the UK, department store chain House of Fraser has announced plans to make its Christmas 2015 windows shoppable, in addition to launching a new mobile app to encourage multichannel shopping. The moves are part of a strategy to turn the 70% of its customers who currently only buy in-store into multichannel consumers.

Chief customer officer Andy Harding commented: "We'll [digitally] enable the whole window from outside, so when the store's closed or busy, you can just shop from the window." For more on the crucial capacity to initiate shopping beyond standard retail hours, see Out-of-Hours Shopping and Media Facades in our Industry Trend Anywhere Retailing, Kate Spade's Digital Hoarding, Sales-Boosting Beacons: Targeted Mobile Marketing, and Start-Pause-Go: Retail in Hyper Flow, part of our Roaming Retail Industry Trend.

For more on digitally enhanced seasonal campaigns, see: Digital Christmas 2014.

For more on advanced technological innovations helping to bolster the retail environment see Enhanced Retail Realities in our Post Digital Macro Trend.