If you weren’t cool enough to get an invite to the Ralph Lauren show during Fashion week, you’ve got a new way to keep up with the Jones’. Ralph Lauren released its fashion app Ralph Lauren Collection for the iPhone last Friday. Developed internally, the Ralph Lauren Collection is a fashion fanatics dream. “We wanted to create the most elegant interactive environment we could for the iPhone,” said a company spokesperson.

The Ralph Lauren fashion app showcases the Fall ‘08 and Spring ‘09 collections. It’s a virtual Look Book of high-quality moving pictures and video. There are backstage pics and a slideshow of looks that you can tap your way through or email to your friends. This venture really appears to be an effort to get the brand in the hands of those who already enjoy it. In fact, a Ralph Lauren spokesperson says “The iPhone is just one area of innovation for us. We have been developing interactive windows and shoppable kiosks for the last three to four years.”

As visually stunning and impressive as the Ralph Lauren collection app seems, there are some drawbacks. The most obvious one being that you can’t order anything. You also can’t piece any of the looks together. This feature would surely be amazing given the slideshow feature the application currently uses. A big disappointment is that they don’t mention any thing about accessories. If you want the skinny on jewelry, handbags, hats, gloves, shoes or boots, you may be running back to your desktop.

While this Ralph Lauren Collection app may satisfy the high end fashion ego by putting a little more Ralph Lauren in their hand it falls flat on its face on its usefulness. Everything you can do here you can do on the Internet. And if you really enjoy any of the designer duds in the application you’ll still have to traipse your way to a Ralph Lauren boutique to get your hands on them anyway. Ralph Lauren does admit that developing mobile applications is a new platform and they feel like “they’re just getting warmed up.”

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category: Entertainment, Productivity, Reference